June 16, 2025 • 60 mins
I love a good spy story. We’ve talked about spies embedded with the American government. We’ve discussed librarians and academics researching in the basement of the Library of Congress during World War II. And now we’re talking with Thomas Maier about a very unlikely spy, a former football player turned spy for Churchill. It’s all in his book, The Invisible Spy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
One of the Nazi spies is hit by a car.
The other spy walking with him, instead of attending to
his colleague, picks up the statue of papers and he
runs off.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. I love a good spy story.
We've talked about spies embedded with the American government. We've
(01:13):
discussed librarians and academics researching in the basement of the
Library of Congress during World War Two, and now we're
talking with Thomas Mayer about a very unlikely spy. A
former football player turned spy for Winston Churchill. It's all
in Mayer's book The Invisible Spy. With this story, what
(01:36):
are the parallels do you think of what we're seeing today,
not even necessarily in the United States, but around the world.
You know, editors will want to know how does this
book resonate with readers today. What do you say?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I think this book is ripped right out of the
headlines of today. We're talking about the impact and the
importance of espionage, how it plays out. A big part
of the book is also about the propaganda campaign that
the British at Rockefeller Center were basically doing behind the
scenes in order to get America into the war. That
(02:12):
was the big hope of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. You know,
at that time, in nineteen forty, Churchill had just become
Prime Minister. He realized that it was very important for
America to get in because at that time London was
being bombed, people were living in the subways. It was
a matter of life and death for the British, and
(02:34):
it was essential in Churchill's eyes that America entered the war,
and so at Rockefeller Center was set up a secret
headquarters up on the thirty sixth floor of Rockefeller Center
where a whole group of British spies, some Canadians and British.
(02:55):
They ran a number of different things, but one of
the major things was a propaganda arm meant to influence
American media. And Ernest Cuneo, who's the subject of my book,
The Invisible Spy. Ernest Cuneo was wearing several different hats,
but you could say he was not only the first
spy American spy of World War One, but he was also,
(03:16):
by today's standards, a massive media influencer. This is really
kind of a walk into the deep state. Today. We
talk about deep state and some of it is just
rhetorical nonsense, but there are people who do make things
happen in the government, and people who are like Ernest Cuneo,
(03:39):
who are familiar with a number of different agencies and
they're the ones who make it happen. And even though
Ernest Couneo wanted to remain anonymous, that was all part
of his job description, if you will. He was very
influential with a number of different agencies, including the first
spy agency of the United Slate States.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I mean, this sounds like an incredible story. We have
spoken to a couple of different authors who have talked
about spies, one in particular, who talked about World War
two spies who were located in Europe and were sending
back information to spies and the basement of the Library
of Congress, And that is also a unlikely spy story.
(04:23):
About archivists and librarians and researchers and basically academic geeks
you know, who have done all this, you, I feel like,
almost have the opposite kind of unlikely spy. So why
don't we get started with you know, Ernest and what
can you tell me about him, maybe from either childhood
or when he was younger that will give us some
context about how he ended up doing what he did.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Well, I'm really intrigued with Ernest Kuneil because he went
to Columbia and I went to Columbia journalism school, and
that kind of caught my eye. But he was an
Italian American kid who grew up in the New York area,
in the suburbs of New Jersey, and he played football
at Columbia when Columbia actually did have a good football team,
and he went into the NFL and he was playing
(05:10):
as an alignment in the NFL in the very early
days of the league. He actually would play for those
people who played football familiar with football. He played all
sixty minutes. He would play offensive lineman and then he
would play defensive lineman, and so he played for a
couple of years. The name of the team that he
played for was the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the baseball team,
(05:32):
the famous baseball team, but there was actually an NFL
franchise back in the early thirties by the name of
Brooklyn Dodgers, and he played for that. And it's the
same time he was going to law school. He got
a law degree. He was working for a time period
for the New York Daily News on the night shift,
so at times he was a reporter. So he was
(05:53):
a really bright guy. He had worked eventually with Walter Winchell,
who was probably, without that the most famous media figure
in America. He was he had a column that appeared
literally in hundreds of newspapers around the country. But he
also had a Sunday night radio broadcast, and that broadcast
(06:15):
was heard by millions of Americans. This is before television,
so on Sunday nights, you tune in and listened to
Walter Winchell. If you've ever heard Winchell's voice, it was
almost like a machine gun approach, or was very He
actually did the narration for a show called The Untouchables
for those people that may have that type of memory
(06:36):
of an old TV show, The Untouchables. But Coonio was
his lawyer h and also Coonia was a lawyer for
another well known media figure named Drew Pearson. And so
to me, Ernest Cooneo was fascinating because on one level,
he wanted to be anonymous, and he felt that that
was a key to his success. And he learned even
(06:58):
though he started out wanting seeking fame as a football player,
he really realized over time that in the world of politics,
in the world of the media, and also particularly in
the world of espionage, that it's really important to behind
the scenes, to become invisible. And that's what Ernest Cuneo became.
(07:20):
And that's one of the reasons why I was fascinated
with this book. The other thing is the life and
times of Ernest Cuneo. He's directly involved in a number
of different very prominent spy cases from the beginning of
World War two, even before America gets involved, from about
nineteen forty all the way through the Cold War and
(07:40):
all the way to the jfk assassination. That's the extent
of my book. And so his life and times involves
things where Ernest directly is involved or because he's working
with agencies that they are involved in a number of
spy cases that I play out in this book. So
for me, it was an opportunity to kind of talk
(08:01):
about the whole growth of American espionage and that's a
remarkable story in and of itself.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Well, let's talk about the transition that he makes from
NFL football player and you know, a law student, lawyer,
and reporter for a newspaper, all of these different things
to how you get from there to the thirty sixth
floor of Rockefeller Center. What year are we in and
put me into the context of where we are in America,
(08:32):
like socioeconomic and everything, and then looking towards what's about
to happen with World War two.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
This is the nineteen thirties, so America is suffering through
the depression. Ernest Cuneo is a hard working kid. He's
been able through a football scholarship to go to Columbia,
but he gets a job eventually working for then Congressman
Fiarello LaGuardia, who eventually becomes the very famous not the
(08:59):
airport for the actual mayor for whom the airport is
named here in New York. And Fiarella LaGuardia was a
mentor for Ernest Cuneo, and that was a really important
thing because he was introduced to a number of different
essentially New York liberals, some of whom had connections with
Columbia that he knew. But they were called the brain
(09:21):
trust of President Franklin Roosevelt. And so when Roosevelt was
elected in nineteen thirty three, eventually, by the mid thirties,
Cuneo gets a job working he's a private attorney, but
he's working with Walter Winchel, but he's also working for
the Democratic Party, the National He's the Associate council for
the National Democratic Party. He's also what is called an
(09:45):
advance man, an advance man for the president and for
other major Democratic candidates. An advance man is that that's
a term of art in political campaigns. They are the
people that go out and scout out locations and they
set up everything. They make sure that the high school
band is playing when the president arrives and all those
type of things. But also because Ernest was working with
(10:08):
Walter Winchell, he really impressed upon them the importance of
being able to essentially manipulate the media, to work with
the media, to cultivate them, to have sources. And he
was a great source for Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson
and the people that he worked with, both at the
White House, eventually with the British spies at Rockefeller Center.
(10:31):
They recognize that about Ernest. So his power was in
his anonymity, if you will. It was. His power was
the ability to get things done, to plant stories, and
my book is replete with examples of that.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
I want to take a little bit of a side
because I'm not sure how many people would know this,
but when we talk about the Democratic Party FDR, he's
elected in three to this Democratic Party, the Democratic Party
has changed dramatically clearly from nineteen thirty three on. I mean,
my first sort of history lesson with the Democratic Party
was Boss Tweed. When this was happening. FDR knew, you know,
(11:16):
on the horizon that word War two was coming or
what was sort of the advance, noticed that things were
going downhill where he starts thinking, and the brain trust
starts thinking, we need a plan because maybe we didn't
have a plan with World War One. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Basically, America has a long history of isolationist views. The
view is that we have this big ocean, both in
the Atlantic and the Pacific that kind of keeps us
from the affairs. You know, in the thirties, it was
only about ten fifteen years past World War One, where
there were a number of young Americans who got killed
(11:50):
in that war, so people were not looking necessarily to
get involved. And yet in Europe particularly, but the rise
of Hitler, the fact that Hitler marched through all of
these countries, Frans Poll and all of these places. By
the late thirties, it was pretty clear that this was
a very serious situation that had to be dealt with.
(12:10):
Roosevelt recognized that, and yet he was also saying in
nineteen forty, when he ran for a third term, Roosevelt
promised at the Boston Garden, it was his last appearance
of that campaign. He said, I promise I wound send
your sons and daughters to to war.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
That was a good impression, thank you.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
So that's October of forty. But already Ernest Couneil was
at war, he was already working with the British spies
at Rockefeller Center. So Roosevelt, who was a masterful politician,
he was able to play three dimensional chess, as they say,
what he was saying publicly was different than what he
was the actions that he knew was necessary because war
(12:56):
was coming in some manner of form, and of course
did with the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Did we have many American spies during World War One
or any located in the United States or British spies.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
No, you know, it's part of this whole isolationist view
of America. This history of isolationist view also has to
do kind of with a disparagement of espionage, which is crazy.
You know, the Germans, the Russians certainly believed in espionage.
Winston Churchill from those earliest days was involved with spying
(13:30):
and such, so they all understood the importance. The Nazis
certainly understand they had spies here in the United States.
But even during the Roosevelts administration, there was a Secretary
of State Henry Stimpson who famously said that gentlemen do
not read the mail of other gentlemen, which was really
(13:52):
interesting for a variety of reasons, but it was crazy.
You need intelligence. If you are a superpower of big power,
or any nation of any size should be having some
level of intelligence gathering. That doesn't mean necessarily a covert
James Bond type of spy, but literally the gathering of intelligence,
(14:14):
the developing of sources. That was really the first step,
and that was impressed upon President Roosevelt, and he allowed
Ernest Cuneo to deal directly with the British spies, and
that kind of, in a way, starts the whole ball
rolling of modern American espionage. You know, it gets more
(14:35):
and more involved as the story goes on, but essentially
when Churchill decides to put those spies in Rockefeller Center,
up on the thirty sixth floor, right across the street
from Saint Patrick's Cathedral, with all these smart alec New
Yorkers walking past, thinking, oh, we know everything that's going on.
I'm a smarter you know, I'm a smarty pant New Yorker,
(14:55):
and they're all oblivious to the fact that up on
the thirty sixth floor is this big foreign spy operation.
And that operation was something that eventually Roosevelt realizes that
we had to follow, we had to model our own
espionage agency, and that began. That be really begins with
Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Well, before we get to Pearl Harbor, take Earnest out
of it for a moment. The British spies, who are
you know, in Rockefeller Center, which is I guess operating
in plain sight? That's a smart thing to do. Yeah, exactly,
much like working in the basement of the Library of Congress.
When you look at these spies in the simplest of
simple terms, what are they doing that is considered you know,
(15:38):
gathering intelligence? Are they receiving information from their spies in Europe?
Or what's the purpose of that group in Rockefeller Center.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Well, they're doing a couple of things. Initially, they get
permission to keep the supply lines open. Spare in mind,
Britain's at war is really important to have those supply
lines coming from America. So that was the way that
they got permission to set up this operation. But very
quickly it expanded into other things. It expanded into keeping
(16:10):
an eye on all the Nazi spies in the United States.
And there were not only some Nazi spies in particularly
in the New York area, but there was also a
number of German born immigrants who were sympathetic to Germany
in fact, and this isolationist group. There was a group
called America First and they were very much pro German
(16:35):
or certainly not anti German, and they had a big
rally and a kind of a quasi Nazi rally at
Madison Square Garden in nineteen thirty nine. About twenty thousand
people were at Madison Square Garden. It was like the
Nickgame here and it was something that was really amazing,
but it was indicative of just how America felt at
(16:56):
that time. There was not only isolations, but there was
a number of peopeople who were for the Germans. So
the British were keeping an eye on the Nazi spies there,
but they also expanded it because the number one thing
that Churchill wanted out of the spy operation was to
convince America to get into the war, because without America's
(17:17):
help they were going to everything was going to sink.
There was very much feared in London that the Nazis
were about to invade Great Britain and everything would be
over by that point, and so they set up a
propaganda arm at Rockefeller Center, and that was one of
the biggest things that Ernest Cutio was involved with. He
was involved with essentially taking various different aspects of the
(17:42):
British views of everything from polling. At one point they
had an astrologer who they imported from London and Ernest
set up a press conference to have this astrologer who
had been a vaudevillian over in England. But he was
a phony astrologer, but he predicted the death of Hitler
because they knew that Hitler followed the British believed that
(18:05):
he was making military decisions. Hitler is making military decisions
based upon the stars, based upon this astrological chart, and
so they had this astrologer come over and it was
Couneo who set up a press conference. This astrologer said
Hitler's going to die, and that got headlines all around
the world. So there were a lot of things like that.
(18:26):
One last thing is that the British also got involved
in elections, which is another factor that's very much we
are concerned about. We hear about Russian interference, foreign interference
with our elections, and indeed the British did get involved
in the nineteen forty congressional campaigns. They went after a
number of different isolationists candidates, both of whom were Republican
(18:49):
and some Democrats. There was a Democrat in the area
where Roosevelt was from, in the Poughkeepsie, New York area,
they went after him, and by that they actually went
to the scene. They actually helped with some rallies. But
they also got involved in polling and surveying, and there
was like a phony poll, a survey that the British
(19:09):
set up that Cunio was very actively involved. I had
all these documents from Cuneo's papers that explain this. But
they did a survey in the nineteen forty Democratic and
Republican national conventions, a survey of how many delegates favored
intervention into the war. Now, most of those people that
(19:30):
were attending congresspeople and such, their letters were saying, don't
send my kids a war. We don't want to, we
don't want to get involved in a foreign war. And
yet the survey magically said that most delegates to both conventions,
Republican Democrats, the favored getting involved in the war. And
that serve that phony survey was reported by a number
(19:52):
of different major newspapers, the New York Times, the Herald
Tribune and such, and it's all laid out in my
in my book. I have the documents that were part
of that. They're up at the FDR library. Kunio's papers
are there and they described a lot that you can
see from the correspondence. How you know exactly what they did.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
This might be another slight deviation from what we're talking about.
But I have a question, because I've researched some about
nativism in the eighteen hundreds, what do you think the
difference was between somebody who is in the nineteen thirties
or forties who I mean, I think FDR is looking
at as the difference between somebody who is an isolationist
(20:35):
and somebody who is a nativist in the United States.
Is there a large difference between the two in the
thirties or forties.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah, I think there was a difference, although they did
overlap certainly. But the Nativists, the No Nothing Party, they
were fundamentally anti immigrant. You know, I've done books. I
did a book about twenty five years ago about the
Kennedys about their Irish Catholic immigrant experience and how it
affected them. Public lives, and that's a big part of
(21:02):
that story. So basically that native is was anti immigrant.
That's fundamentally what that was about. The isolationists was to
some extent had its roots in George Washington's farewell address
that he warned about foreign entanglements, and there was a view.
(21:23):
I don't know if it was a conservative view or whatever,
because I think a lot of liberals share this view
as well, that why are we getting involved in Vietnam,
for instance, or why are we getting involved in Iraq? Why?
And we certainly see that these days now. Of course
that comes back to bite us in the proverbial rear ends,
and that certainly we saw that with Hitler that we
just could not Hitler was not going to go away,
(21:46):
and Roosevelt knew that, but he what he had to do,
like any good politicianist kind of lead the populace to
recognizing the reality. And so there was a distinction between
the name of this view and this isolationist view.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
I mean, you bring up so many things for me
I researched. I once wanted to do a book on
Boss Tweed, who is you know, of course, a very
corrupt politician, Damminy Hall in the late eighteen hundreds, but
also on Thomas nast Sure, the cartoonist who was a
just incredible nativist, and some of his you know, cartoons
and sketch's political cartoons were of course very anti Irish. Okay,
(22:25):
So I think we started talking about Pearl Harbor. You said,
that's where something's changed. Was that maybe the view shifting
of the public of whether we should be involved.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, it was the blatancy of that attack, kind of
nine to eleven like for today's audience. It was a
shocking event. And so that was the turning point. That's
where we immediately entered the war. And in fact, shortly thereafter,
Churchill comes over to the United States. He spends Christmas,
(22:58):
the Christmas holidays that year, this is in nineteen forty
one with FDR, and they literally map out their plans
for the how to prosecute the war in Europe. And
so this was when Churchill heard about Pearl Harbor. He
said to his son Randolph, essentially his prayers had been answered.
(23:18):
Now the United States would get involved, and now we
would be saved because Britain had been at warf by
that point for about two and a half years.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Now, you said, I think in the book that Ernest
had acted as sort of this liaison between the British
spies in Rockefeller Center and you know, the brain trust
with FDR, and then there's Churchill. How does that exactly work?
I hear that. You know, Ernest can do some pretty
amazing things, as you said, like an influencer and has
(23:47):
all of these great ideas, particularly with spinning the media
and the public. But what were his actual sort of
job duties.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Well, to some extent, you know, it's funny because he'd
definitely liked to keep it somewhat so that he couldn't
necessarily be pinned down with In fact, at one point
he decided not to accept a paycheck with the Office
of Strategic Services, just so that he would be free
to do what be on his own, to some extent
(24:14):
that he was almost like a free agent. Specifically, he
started by working with the British at Rockefeller Center. It
was there that, for instance, that he met two very
important people in his life. Subsequently, Ian Fleming, who created
James Bond, who was also a British spy there, and
he met a Canadian spy there by the name of
(24:36):
Margaret Watson, who eventually becomes Cuneo's wife. There's kind of
a romance there, and that was also one of the
things that kind of like pulled me as a writer
to the book, this kind of romance at Rockefeller Center.
I actually I actually proposed to my wife at Rockefeller Center.
So yeah, so it kind of grabbed my eye there.
(24:57):
But his job was to deal at first with the Brits,
and then as things moved along, he was planting stories.
I mean, the Brits were a great source of stories
for Walter Winchell, his boss. The main source of money
for Ernest Cooney. It was not so much what he
was getting from the government, but what he was getting
as a fees, legal fees. He was a very good
(25:20):
libel lawyer, for instance, and working for Walter Winchell paid
him a lot of money in those days. And then
also so did Drew Pearson. Pearson had been a if
you're familiar with Jack Anderson, it's the same column. It's
called the Washington Merry Go Round and it was a
very famous investigative before Woodward and Bernstein. This was the
(25:41):
column where people would look for the dirt in Washington.
And it was Drew Pearson who started Drew Pearson as
a young man was a Columbia teacher and one of
his students was Ernest Cuneo. So they were like these
very interesting personal connections that Cuneo had. But as time
went on, Cuneo's portfit just got wider and wider, so
(26:03):
that he is working with the Brits, he's working with
the various different media people, but also he's working with
the FBI because he knows and has actually gone out
with Winchell and others. With the FBI head Jaya good Hoover.
They would go to a place called the Store Club
where Winchall had his own table there and it was
(26:25):
very famous. All these Broadway and movie people were there,
so he knew Hoover. Hoover became famous because of Winchell
and Hoover running after gangsters, so he knew Hoover. You know,
Cuneo knew Hoover, he knew The National Security Advisor from
Roosevelt was a guy named Adolph Burle who was his
(26:46):
title was Assistant Secretary of State, but he essentially was
the national what we call now the National Security Advisor.
And Burl had been Punio's teacher at Columbia, So you know,
it was kind of an interesting world that he knew.
He knew that people in the Justice Department, he knew
a couple of Supreme Court in Washington. There was a
(27:06):
building it was called the Armatage and it's where a
number of top people with power had They had little
apartments there when they were in Washington, and Cuneo had
enough funds that he also had an apartment there. So
you know, a lot of these things are done over drinks,
over lunch. So that's how more and more Cuneo's portfolio expanded.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Well, how tight of an operation is this? I mean,
you've mentioned quite a few people who are involved, which
I'm sure is normal. But you know, you've got some
newspaper folks, and you know that it seems wide ranging,
including a assuming attractive female Canadians. Buy was this considered
a really good safe operation or you know, was this
(27:53):
sort of not as tightly organized as it could have been.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
No, it's definitely dangerous. In fact, Margaret Watson was a
young woman late twenties who was one of many women
from the Winnipeg area in Canada who were recruited to
work at Rockefeller Center by Churchill's top spy his name
was William quote unquote Intrepid. That was kind of his
code name, William Intrepid Stevenson, and Stevenson had been a
(28:20):
war hero. He was trusted by Churchill. He recruited a
number of young women from Canada to work there. In
the case of Margaret Watson, she had this photographic memory.
According to both I interviewed both Cuneo's children. They were
adults when I interviewed them. She had a photographic memory.
There were other women who, did you know, some very
(28:42):
functionary type of job, secretary jobs and stuff like that.
But there were others who were real spies out there
in the field spies. One of the more interesting characters
was a woman whose code name was Cynthia Amy Pack
was her real name, and she was a woman who
basically used her her sexual attractiveness to compromise foreign dignitaries
(29:05):
in Washington. And there's an older woman who worked out
a Rockefeller Center for the Churchill spies who was her
handler as they call it. But Cynthia, and I tell
some of the stories of Cynthia in my book The
Invisible Spy. But she is a fascinating character, needless to say,
using her sexual wiles to get secrets out of foreign
(29:28):
dignitaries and such. Conversely, there was actually some male spies
that had a similar talent as well. One of them
is Raul Dahl, the children's book author, who was a
British spy. Oh I didn't know that, yes, And he
was very attractive to women for that magical reason that
(29:51):
that kis myth that happens between people, and he had
a number of affairs that were aimed at helping elicit
information from key people, one of whom was a congresswoman
named Claire booth Loose that raw Dahl had an affair with.
Claire booth Loose was married to Henry Loose, who owned
(30:11):
Time magazine and Life magazine, and she was very prominent,
as was her husband. But she had an affair with
Raul Dall so much so and they were so active
that a certain point Raudall complained to the British spies
superiors saying I'm exhausted, I can't do this anymore. And
(30:32):
he won it off. And as the story goes, the
spymaster in charge of Doll said, well, did you ever
see that movie The Henry the Eighth where he says
the things I must do for England. Well, that's exactly
your position, the things you must do for England. So
you know, it was just an interesting time period. Of
(30:52):
all these different characters. The female spies at Rockefeller Center
were almost as interesting or just as interesting as the
male spy. And I guess the one that was most
important to Ernest Cuneo was Ian Fleming because they become
lifelong friends. With the start of the war.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Okay, so you had said with Pearl Harbor, the public
sentiment starts to change towards the United States getting involved, right.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Majorly, like nine to eleven, you know, the way it
just catapults things.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
But Ernest had figured out some ways to sort of
boost this, you know, kind of tricking around with Poles
to say, you know that the congressional sentiment is more
leaning towards getting involved, right and all of this, when
do things heat up for them? I mean more than
is there anything that happens that's more than sort of
the you know, these placing of these stories things that
(31:46):
feel like they're really making a huge shift or is
it a tiny lots of little amounts of shifts that
just end up having a big influence.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
There's really kind of like two periods. There's a period
from the summer nineteen forty when Churchill comes to power
and they set up things at Rockefeller Center, and then
bear in mind it's almost so that's in the summer
of forty about a year and a half almost until
Pearl Harbor happens in December of nineteen forty one. So
that's part of things. The British spies were very active.
(32:18):
In fact, I begin my book with a circumstance where
two Nazi spies are walking through Times Square, the heart
of Manhattan in New York City, and with them is
a satchel containing papers planning how they're going to blow
up Manhattan in the event that America finally gets into
the war. And so they're walking and one of the
(32:40):
Nazi spies is hit by a car. What happens is
the other spy walking with him, instead of attending to
his colleague and these fatal injuries that he had, he's
literally bleeding out is that ran over his head and such. Instead,
he picks up the satchel of papers and he runs
off good spy. So the cops show up at the scene,
(33:01):
right the New York City cops and the dead man
his papers say that he's a Spaniard and he's got
these phony Spanish papers. So the cops check. The New
York City cops check with the Spanish consulate and they say, no,
there's no record of this guy. We don't know who
this guy is. And so the cops go to the
FBI Jague Hoover. Hoover doesn't know who it is. But
(33:24):
eventually what happens is they are in contact with the
British spies at Rockefeller Center and they know who this
sky is and how do they know how this guy is. Well,
one of the operations that they have is that in Bermuda,
at the Princess Hotel in Hamilton in the basement. It's
(33:45):
a very fancy hotel, but they had an operation where
the mail that were being sent from America to Europe
would go through Bermuda. Bear in mind, you know, they
would fly it over and such, but they would go
through the mail and they were able to and it
was tons of people involved in this operation, but they
were able to spot a letter by the guy who
(34:06):
ran away from the scene. The other Nazi spy who survived,
the one with the satchel. He wrote back to his
superiors in Germany, but in a letter, and it detailed
what happened, and so they were eventually able to find
out where that Nazi spy was living. They traced the
addresses and such, and so the FBI sets up this
(34:27):
manhunt on this guy and for a while they just
watch him, and he has all these other different spies
that are related. So eventually the FBI comes up with
I think they indicted something like fifteen people eventually as
part of that spy ring. And so the Brits were
way more advanced than either the FBI or the New
(34:48):
York City Police at that time period. I start my
book with that case because it also illustrates just how
clueless we were about espionage at the beginning of World
War Two and just how advanced the British war.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Now, how does Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond,
come into all of this, because I know they become
very good friends, he and Ernest, and also what Ernest
does inspires Fleming, you know for the James Bond series.
So does this come in the middle of World War two?
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Is that what happened in the beginning actually before Pearl Harbor? Okay,
So Ian Fleming is this very suave guy. You know,
you'll see pictures of Ian Fleming with these cigarette holders,
and he's a thin, very astude. He's a writer and
Cutio is definitely a writer, but he's also a lawyer.
But Cutio is a different that guy. He looks like
(35:42):
a human refrigerator if you will. I mean, he's like
five foot nine. He was a lineman in the NFL.
So this is by nineteen forty he meets Ian Fleming,
so they're very two different characters. Fleming is working for
British intelligence and he's a very smart and creative guy.
He's working for a very powerful admiral. Admiral Godfrey was
(36:07):
his name, and so Fleming is involved with coming up
with a number of different operations. There's a play of
musical right now in Manhattan called Operation Mincemeat. It's a
play the origins of Operation Minsweet, which was using a
corpse to throw off the Nazis, and the corpse is
found by the Nazis determine that the invasion is going
(36:30):
to take place in one place and instead it's going
to take place another place in Italy, and so that
was Fleming's idea, but he was also very creative in
other respects. And so he and Cuneo, even though there
were very different men, ones of brit ones of American,
different looking, they like to go out and party, they
(36:52):
liked to have fun, they liked women, They like going
out to nightclubs. Their scenes at the fellow who ran
the Churchill Spies, his name was William Intrepid Stevenson. They
would come up to his he had like this duplex
in Manhattan with a big fireplace, and they'd be sharing drinks.
And in Cuneo's memoirs there's some of the exchanges that
(37:16):
he had with Fleming that I repeat in my book.
But they become friends and so. And what's interesting is
that after the war, you know, most people went their
separate ways, they remained friends. In fact, they went into
business together. They created they were involved in a newspaper
syndicate company called NANA was short. It was North American
(37:39):
Newspaper Alliance. But it was a company where they would
have syndicated columnists and such. But it was also a
way of keeping in contact with the intelligence world and such.
So Fleming worked out of London for this company and
Cutio ran it in New York. But they were Buddies.
There was another friend, like a childhood friend of Ian
(38:01):
Flemings's name was Iver Bryce, and Iver was a very
wealthy man, and the three of them basically ran this
company together. Eventually, somewhat on a lark. Finally Fleming he
had talked for years about writing a novel, and so
he finally writes the novel. It comes out, and the
character's name is James Bond. It's name for an autobond expert,
(38:26):
but in any event, he comes up and it's basically
James Bond is patterned on William Stevenson, the guy who
was running the Churchill Intrepid Intrepid exactly and actually there
are scenes in the first James Bond novel that actually happened.
They were kind of exaggerated versions of what happened at
Rockefeller Center that's in Casino Royale. But then eventually, with
(38:52):
that first James Bond novel, Fleming realizes that he needs
to know more about America because he really only knows
America through manhe Night Spots and such, and also with Washington,
d C. But he doesn't know the rest of America.
So he prevails on Coutio to go out and they
go out to Chicago and they go out to Las Vegas.
(39:14):
Cuneo has sources out in Las Vegas, the casinos, and
eventually they go out to Hollywood. But some of those
scenes are in James Bond books like Diamonds Are Forever.
And in fact, the one where I guess Cuneo had
the most impact was on Thunderball. It was a very
popular novel and very popular movie with Sean Connery. The
(39:36):
movie treatment for that was actually written by Cutio. In fact,
Fletting wanted Cuneo to play the bad guy who was
supposed to be a mobster, and as an Italian American,
Cuneo didn't want to have anything to do with with
that type of slur on the Italian people, and so
(39:57):
of course they got other actors and such. But Fleming
dedicated Thunderball the novel to Cuneo. He says, to Ernest
Cuneo my muse, and he provided a lot of different ideas.
I thought one of the most fun parts of my
book is that trip, that cross country trip that Cuneo,
the American and Ian Fleming, the creator of this British
(40:20):
spy James Bond, just going out there and who they
meet and how he learns about America.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
What were the things that you said were kind of
exaggerated in James Bond, but that were inspired by Ernest
and his work. Were there any kind of like direct
correlations where you could say, oh, my gosh, oh yeah,
what's a good example.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
In Casino Royale, there was a scene that was based
upon a real life circumstance in which Fleming. This is
early before Pearl Harbor, but when the British are at
Rockefeller Center, there were a number of other countries that
had consulates in the Rockefeller Center area, including the Japanese.
And one night, this is what happened in real life life,
(41:00):
is that Stevenson decided in the middle of the night
to break in to the Japanese consulate office, break into
their Somehow they were able to get the codes for
the safe there, and they were able to take out
the code papers, the cipher papers and sets the codes,
take them, go up to their offices up on the
(41:21):
thirty sixth floor, make copies of these code papers and
then put them back in the safe of the Japanese.
And Flevty loved that idea. He just loved, you know,
he just loved adventure and all that type of stuff,
and Stevenson was the person who would do those type
of things. He was he would push the envelope, as
they say. So that was a real the real life experience.
(41:45):
He took that and he exaggerated it in Casino Royale
where James Bond actually assassinates a Japanese cipher expert through
the window. He's up, he's up on one of the
buildings Ackefeller Center, and he shoots through the window and
kills this Japanese cipher expert in this envisioned version of
(42:09):
what actually happened in real life, or it was kind
of based upon real life. But Fleming, just with James Fond,
he let's say, made into a more memorable violent episode.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
I didn't realize that Ian Fleming has any I just
thought he was an author. I guess I didn't know
that he had some background in you know, espionage is
his just briefly, what was Fleming's background before he decided
to stop and do a novel, just your average British spy.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
No, quite the contrary. He was a writer. He saw
this as a way of it's just a very interesting life.
And you know, he was one of those things that
in other words, getting involved. He was in naval intelligence,
so he was an officer. There's pictures of Ian Fleming
after the war. He has a couple of different jobs.
He eventually one of the jobs is he winds up
(42:58):
becoming the London representative for Cuneo's company that he Cunio
was running in New York, this Nana company, the newspaper syndicate.
But Fleming fundamentally was a writer, but he had not
tried his hand with the James Bond novels, and they
didn't come out until I think fifty three was the
first one, and then over time they became more and
(43:19):
more popular. The James Bond novels were particularly made popular
when President Kennedy took office in nineteen sixty one, and
there were interviews with people and they said, what are
some of your favorite books, and he said the James
Bond books. In fact, Jackie Kennedy was also a big
proponent of She liked the James Bond books as well
(43:41):
that her husband was reading. And she sent a copy
of one of the James Bond books to Alan Dulles,
who was then the head of the CIA, and said,
you know, you should read this book. And then actually
there was some pressure on the CIA to try to
come up with the gadgets that you see in these
James Bond movies, know, the exploding cigars, all these other
(44:03):
different killing devices. They would see these movies in the
Kennedy administration say well, well, CIA, can you think you
can maybe come up with something like this? And so
Leming had remarkable success. He really captured the time, and
obviously it became a big franchise.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Tell me a little bit before we kind of talk
about post war stuff with Cunia. What is Ernest's relationship
with Margaret Watson? Like, I know that they eventually get married.
So these two spies decided to have children. I don't
know if that seems like a great idea, but this
must have been post spy for them. I guess yeah,
it was.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Well, I think, you know a lot of people after
World War Two, after depression, suffering through the depression, and
then having five years four years of World War a
lot of people dying, there were a lot of people
eager to go back and go home and create families
and such. Margaret Watson was a fascinating character. As I mentioned,
she had a photographic memory. She was apparently involved in
(45:03):
some of the financial aspects. And there's a story that
her children, both her son and her daughter, both of
them are very distinguished attorneys. In fact, the son, John Kutio,
I dedicate my book to him. It's one of the
people I dedicate my book The Invisible Spy to him,
but he just recently died. But both of them told
(45:23):
me a story about their mother. There was a point
at which some type of Nazi spy broke into the
dormitory where Watson and a number of other female spies
working for that Churchill operation Rockefeller Center where they lived.
It was nearby Rockefeller Center, and somehow they broke in.
It's not really clear exactly why they keyed in on
(45:44):
Margaret Watson, but the spy actually put a pillow over it.
She was trying to go to sleep, and then he
broke in, tried to smother her, and she broke free.
She yelled for help, and they took care of the
person that broke in. Clearly had a German accent, that
was the one thing that was very clear, uh, And
they took care of him, as they say. So that
(46:06):
was kind of an interesting thing. The idea of this
woman from like a lot of the Canadian women who
were working as Churchill's spies of Rockefeller Center. You know,
they had come from relatively rural areas, a relatively small
populated areas, and to come to the big city that
was a that was a big thing for them. With
Ernest Cuneo, I think what she's what Margaret Watson saw
(46:31):
in Earnest was and again she was. They were very
different personalities, but Cooneo knew everybody, it seemed. She would
go out to the nightclubs with Ernest, she would meet
all these famous people like Walter Winchell. He really knew
this whole new world, this fascinating world of Manhattan, and
(46:51):
that was a big part of I think their romance.
Uh there. And and so when the war ends, they
decided to get married. For Ernest Cuneo, he had been
married before he was on the rebound, as both his
children told me, he had been married to somebody had
met at Columbia and it just wasn't working out, and
they divorced just before the war. But Margaret Watson was
(47:15):
somebody that really became his lifelong partner. They formed a
family together.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
He just died a couple of decades thirty years ago.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Maybe, yeah, I'm sorry. As far as the chronology, Ernest
graduated I believe like in twenty eight twenty nine somewhere
in that ballpark, and his wife Zilda was her name.
They were married for about eight years, so they get
divorced in like thirty eight thirty nine, somewhere in that ballpark.
(47:46):
There was apparently another woman that I mentioned briefly in
the book. I couldn't get any more details about that,
but there apparently was another woman. But fundamentally it just
didn't work out. Cunea was working for the president. When
you work for somebody like that, you're working all the time,
you're away from the home. I don't know what other
(48:07):
private problems that were between it, but they divorced, and
so by the time that Ernest is meeting Margaret Watson,
that would have been probably sometime in either late forty
or more likely or sometime in nineteen forty one. What
was interesting to me was Stevenson, who was the top
(48:28):
spy for Churchill at Rockefeller Center. He had brought all
these young women into the spy operation there, and so
they were very careful about telling women not to get
involved and not to disclose information about what was going on,
and be very wary of who they were talking to,
because you would never know if they were somehow going
(48:48):
to be compromised by some other foreign agent or whatever.
In the case of Margaret Watson, I interviewed both her
children and I asked, was Stevenson kind of encouraging this
relationship between Watson, Margaret and Ernie that in other words,
it was really important for the Churchill Spies to have
(49:12):
Ernest Cuneo as their friend, working on their behalf, talking
to the White House on all these different things. He
was making all these things happen for him. He was
the go between between the British and the White House,
and so to have a young woman who Ernest clearly likes.
Did Stephenson kind of push this on? Did he encourage
(49:36):
this relationship with beyond just romance? Was it somehow manipulating
these two young people? And it's interesting because they weren't
really sure. They didn't think so, But the daughter of
Ernest Cuneo said, well, I know for a fact though
my mother would not have done anything without the okay
of Stevenson. So I think it was something that was
(50:00):
just a fortuitous thing that happened, that this romance with
this vital American connection Ernest Cuneo was taking place.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Was helpful, apparently very helpful. Okay, what is post war
like for them? Until you know they both die? We
have these two kids, you know, everybody's coming home. Is
this the end of spying? Do they go? Does he
go back to lawyering? What happens?
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Well, he did go back to lawyering. He made a
bundle working for Winchell and for Drew Pearson in the
media as a libel lawyer and legal counsel, an advisor
just in general made a lot of money. Winchell was
the highest pay by far, the highest paid person in
the media. But also he set up this company that
he's working with, Ian Fleming. It was a way for
(50:49):
getting together. In fact, Fleming and Iver Bryce. They would
go up to a place that Iver Bryce had up
in upstate New York and they would hang out and
they had a high old time hanging out together. This
is after World War Two. But Ernest never severs his
ties to people like Alan Dulles. Alan Dulles was the
(51:10):
head of the CIA, but he actually began at Rockefeller Center.
He had been a lawyer. He began, and he was
a very successful spy for the United States. They eventually
sent him over to Switzerland, and that's where Dulles was
a particularly effective spy for them. But he began at
Rockefeller Center and he knew he actually was involved in
(51:31):
an operation that Cuneo actually came up with the idea
for it. So Cutio never severed those ties with Dulles,
and so he would be what they call in the
CIA terminology, he was an asset. He was somebody that
always had his eyes and ears and whatever he saw.
If he saw people that he thought might be Russian
double agents and such, he would report that to Dulles,
(51:55):
and so he kept that. One of the most extraordinary
things in my book is a couple of FBI memos
that had never been apparently has never been reported about before.
But when John F. Kennedy is assassinated, President Kennedy is
assassinated in nineteen sixty three, Alan Dulles has put on
(52:16):
the Warren Commission. There were seven members of it, and
Alan Dulles at some point during the deliberations while they're
investigating the president's murder, he wants to make clear that
somehow the CIA is not to blame for that, you know,
somehow they didn't protect Kennedy from the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
(52:36):
And so there are apparently Dulles was leaking information to
Ernest Cuneo, who planned to write almost a book like
the twenty thousand word magazine article for a magazine called
The Saturday Evening Post. And so he's leaking this information
to Cuneo Dulles's and Cuneo then goes to Hoover, who
(53:00):
he knows as well, and he's trying to see if
he can get Hoover to cooperate in this. And Hoover
is smart enough to realize, wait a minute, the President
of the United States doesn't want anybody talking about this
investigation of Kennedy's murder. This is the Warren Commission in
the middle of this investigation, and so they write these memos.
(53:22):
It's kind of what they call a cover your ass memo.
And basically the memos and I quote these in my book,
is by Hoover and his number two at the FBI.
They say, Ernest Cuneo's come in and apparently Alan Dulles
is leaking to him about what's going on at the
Warren Commission, and we told him, you know, we like you, Ernest,
(53:43):
but we can't tell you anything. We can't get involved
in this, and we're very firm. And that's known in
bureaucratic terms as covering your ass. That it's basically memorializing
what happened, just so that they have a memory and
that they all can say, oh no, now that article
that Cuneo was preparing never ran. Who knows what happened.
(54:05):
There was a federal judge that also had worked for
the FBI, and Cuneo talked to him as well about
it because he thought that he might be able to
get information from the FBI through this judge. But it's
extraordinary because this is the first known leak by the
Warren Commission, and it comes back to Alan Dulles. And
what we already know historically is Dulles was not telling
(54:28):
the Warren Commission about the attempts to kill Cashtro by
the CIA. He kept that top secret. So people who
looked at the Warren who were on the Warren Commission,
like future President Gerald Ford, they had no idea that
the CIA was trying to kill Castro, and that Castro
has said, if you're trying to kill me. I can
go after you. He said that just shortly before the assassinations.
(54:52):
So Dulles we know who was already keeping things, but
these documents indicate he was also leaking to try to
been the story and try to basically get the cias
and his version of what was going on before the
actual printing of the Warren Report to the public.
Speaker 1 (55:10):
Well, at the end of the day, what do you
think was the meaning behind Ernest's work in all of this?
I mean, what's the big takeaway for you on why
his story was important enough for you to publish? You know,
and it's certainly not just the first American spy in
World War Two. There's a lot more to him. So
(55:32):
what was that?
Speaker 2 (55:33):
Well, a couple of things. What is Yes, Virginia, there
is a deep state. It's not as extensive or fictitious
as we hear some of the modern politicians you know
in our time period who are doing it mainly for
political purposes. But there are people in the government who've
been worked in key agencies who make things work. You
(55:57):
can call them fixers, but they're the ones. You know.
There will be people who make politicians and public officials
to say things to the public at press conferences. But
then there are people who really make it happen.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
Ray Cohen would be one of those people.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
You know, well, yeah, no, but even within government, I
mean in in a spy agency. You know, if you
ever watched the movie the TV show Homeland, Carrie the
main character, she's making things happen and such, there are
people in every agency that make things happen. So to
some extent, that was part of Cuneo's the importance of
people behind the scenes. So I've spent forty years as
(56:33):
an investigative reporter. One of the things you learn is
that sometimes it's the middle level people who know the
most of what's really going on. But also it underlines
the importance of espionage. Why it's so important that we
have people of good character involved in our intelligence operations,
(56:54):
not only in terms of gathering information, but to the
extent that we get involved in covert opirations, kind of
like the James Bond type of things. We're watching these
things very carefully. It's a tough job, it can be
a dirty job, but it's an essential job to keeping
the peace and being a powerful country. Espionage is really important.
(57:15):
Winston Churchill always knew that you didn't have to explain that.
But for the Americans, with this isolationist history, that's something
that keeps on coming back in our history. History gives
us a lot of lessons and it's a big takeaway,
you know. And I also thought it was interesting in
terms of Ernest Kuneo's very aware of being an Italian
(57:35):
American and one of the backdrops of my story is
just what it's like to be a kid of immigrant parents.
And you know, at times he was the kid with
the nose up against the glass looking into the higher
reaches of power, and he was not being invited. And
there he got in there eventually, but he was never
(57:58):
like a top player, always like the middle level player.
And so in fact, there's a scene in World War
Two in this book where they were talking about intering,
putting into camps Italian Americans who were born in Italy
but here in the United States because we were at
war with Mazsolini and the Italian government, and so there
(58:22):
was talk about it was about six hundred thousand Italian
Americans who they were seriously thinking of putting into camps,
just like we were interning Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast,
and Kutio got involved in that. He heard about it, he
acted upon it. He was a real advocate for Italian
Americans and argued against it, and he did so effectively.
(58:43):
He was one of the people that helped steer our
government's policy in that regard. So there's a lot of
parallels and we definitely can learn from history with a
story like Ernest Kunios.
Speaker 1 (59:04):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(59:29):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
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Apple Podcasts or Wherever you get your podcasts, Follow Wicked
(59:50):
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at wicked words pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
One of the Nazi spies is hit by a car.
The other spy walking with him, instead of attending to
his colleague, picks up the statue of papers and he
runs off.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. I love a good spy story.
We've talked about spies embedded with the American government. We've
(01:13):
discussed librarians and academics researching in the basement of the
Library of Congress during World War Two, and now we're
talking with Thomas Mayer about a very unlikely spy. A
former football player turned spy for Winston Churchill. It's all
in Mayer's book The Invisible Spy. With this story, what
(01:36):
are the parallels do you think of what we're seeing today,
not even necessarily in the United States, but around the world.
You know, editors will want to know how does this
book resonate with readers today. What do you say?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I think this book is ripped right out of the
headlines of today. We're talking about the impact and the
importance of espionage, how it plays out. A big part
of the book is also about the propaganda campaign that
the British at Rockefeller Center were basically doing behind the
scenes in order to get America into the war. That
(02:12):
was the big hope of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. You know,
at that time, in nineteen forty, Churchill had just become
Prime Minister. He realized that it was very important for
America to get in because at that time London was
being bombed, people were living in the subways. It was
a matter of life and death for the British, and
(02:34):
it was essential in Churchill's eyes that America entered the war,
and so at Rockefeller Center was set up a secret
headquarters up on the thirty sixth floor of Rockefeller Center
where a whole group of British spies, some Canadians and British.
(02:55):
They ran a number of different things, but one of
the major things was a propaganda arm meant to influence
American media. And Ernest Cuneo, who's the subject of my book,
The Invisible Spy. Ernest Cuneo was wearing several different hats,
but you could say he was not only the first
spy American spy of World War One, but he was also,
(03:16):
by today's standards, a massive media influencer. This is really
kind of a walk into the deep state. Today. We
talk about deep state and some of it is just
rhetorical nonsense, but there are people who do make things
happen in the government, and people who are like Ernest Cuneo,
(03:39):
who are familiar with a number of different agencies and
they're the ones who make it happen. And even though
Ernest Couneo wanted to remain anonymous, that was all part
of his job description, if you will. He was very
influential with a number of different agencies, including the first
spy agency of the United Slate States.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I mean, this sounds like an incredible story. We have
spoken to a couple of different authors who have talked
about spies, one in particular, who talked about World War
two spies who were located in Europe and were sending
back information to spies and the basement of the Library
of Congress, And that is also a unlikely spy story.
(04:23):
About archivists and librarians and researchers and basically academic geeks
you know, who have done all this, you, I feel like,
almost have the opposite kind of unlikely spy. So why
don't we get started with you know, Ernest and what
can you tell me about him, maybe from either childhood
or when he was younger that will give us some
context about how he ended up doing what he did.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Well, I'm really intrigued with Ernest Kuneil because he went
to Columbia and I went to Columbia journalism school, and
that kind of caught my eye. But he was an
Italian American kid who grew up in the New York area,
in the suburbs of New Jersey, and he played football
at Columbia when Columbia actually did have a good football team,
and he went into the NFL and he was playing
(05:10):
as an alignment in the NFL in the very early
days of the league. He actually would play for those
people who played football familiar with football. He played all
sixty minutes. He would play offensive lineman and then he
would play defensive lineman, and so he played for a
couple of years. The name of the team that he
played for was the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the baseball team,
(05:32):
the famous baseball team, but there was actually an NFL
franchise back in the early thirties by the name of
Brooklyn Dodgers, and he played for that. And it's the
same time he was going to law school. He got
a law degree. He was working for a time period
for the New York Daily News on the night shift,
so at times he was a reporter. So he was
(05:53):
a really bright guy. He had worked eventually with Walter Winchell,
who was probably, without that the most famous media figure
in America. He was he had a column that appeared
literally in hundreds of newspapers around the country. But he
also had a Sunday night radio broadcast, and that broadcast
(06:15):
was heard by millions of Americans. This is before television,
so on Sunday nights, you tune in and listened to
Walter Winchell. If you've ever heard Winchell's voice, it was
almost like a machine gun approach, or was very He
actually did the narration for a show called The Untouchables
for those people that may have that type of memory
(06:36):
of an old TV show, The Untouchables. But Coonio was
his lawyer h and also Coonia was a lawyer for
another well known media figure named Drew Pearson. And so
to me, Ernest Cooneo was fascinating because on one level,
he wanted to be anonymous, and he felt that that
was a key to his success. And he learned even
(06:58):
though he started out wanting seeking fame as a football player,
he really realized over time that in the world of politics,
in the world of the media, and also particularly in
the world of espionage, that it's really important to behind
the scenes, to become invisible. And that's what Ernest Cuneo became.
(07:20):
And that's one of the reasons why I was fascinated
with this book. The other thing is the life and
times of Ernest Cuneo. He's directly involved in a number
of different very prominent spy cases from the beginning of
World War two, even before America gets involved, from about
nineteen forty all the way through the Cold War and
(07:40):
all the way to the jfk assassination. That's the extent
of my book. And so his life and times involves
things where Ernest directly is involved or because he's working
with agencies that they are involved in a number of
spy cases that I play out in this book. So
for me, it was an opportunity to kind of talk
(08:01):
about the whole growth of American espionage and that's a
remarkable story in and of itself.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Well, let's talk about the transition that he makes from
NFL football player and you know, a law student, lawyer,
and reporter for a newspaper, all of these different things
to how you get from there to the thirty sixth
floor of Rockefeller Center. What year are we in and
put me into the context of where we are in America,
(08:32):
like socioeconomic and everything, and then looking towards what's about
to happen with World War two.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
This is the nineteen thirties, so America is suffering through
the depression. Ernest Cuneo is a hard working kid. He's
been able through a football scholarship to go to Columbia,
but he gets a job eventually working for then Congressman
Fiarello LaGuardia, who eventually becomes the very famous not the
(08:59):
airport for the actual mayor for whom the airport is
named here in New York. And Fiarella LaGuardia was a
mentor for Ernest Cuneo, and that was a really important
thing because he was introduced to a number of different
essentially New York liberals, some of whom had connections with
Columbia that he knew. But they were called the brain
(09:21):
trust of President Franklin Roosevelt. And so when Roosevelt was
elected in nineteen thirty three, eventually, by the mid thirties,
Cuneo gets a job working he's a private attorney, but
he's working with Walter Winchel, but he's also working for
the Democratic Party, the National He's the Associate council for
the National Democratic Party. He's also what is called an
(09:45):
advance man, an advance man for the president and for
other major Democratic candidates. An advance man is that that's
a term of art in political campaigns. They are the
people that go out and scout out locations and they
set up everything. They make sure that the high school
band is playing when the president arrives and all those
type of things. But also because Ernest was working with
(10:08):
Walter Winchell, he really impressed upon them the importance of
being able to essentially manipulate the media, to work with
the media, to cultivate them, to have sources. And he
was a great source for Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson
and the people that he worked with, both at the
White House, eventually with the British spies at Rockefeller Center.
(10:31):
They recognize that about Ernest. So his power was in
his anonymity, if you will. It was. His power was
the ability to get things done, to plant stories, and
my book is replete with examples of that.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
I want to take a little bit of a side
because I'm not sure how many people would know this,
but when we talk about the Democratic Party FDR, he's
elected in three to this Democratic Party, the Democratic Party
has changed dramatically clearly from nineteen thirty three on. I mean,
my first sort of history lesson with the Democratic Party
was Boss Tweed. When this was happening. FDR knew, you know,
(11:16):
on the horizon that word War two was coming or
what was sort of the advance, noticed that things were
going downhill where he starts thinking, and the brain trust
starts thinking, we need a plan because maybe we didn't
have a plan with World War One. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Basically, America has a long history of isolationist views. The
view is that we have this big ocean, both in
the Atlantic and the Pacific that kind of keeps us
from the affairs. You know, in the thirties, it was
only about ten fifteen years past World War One, where
there were a number of young Americans who got killed
(11:50):
in that war, so people were not looking necessarily to
get involved. And yet in Europe particularly, but the rise
of Hitler, the fact that Hitler marched through all of
these countries, Frans Poll and all of these places. By
the late thirties, it was pretty clear that this was
a very serious situation that had to be dealt with.
(12:10):
Roosevelt recognized that, and yet he was also saying in
nineteen forty, when he ran for a third term, Roosevelt
promised at the Boston Garden, it was his last appearance
of that campaign. He said, I promise I wound send
your sons and daughters to to war.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
That was a good impression, thank you.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
So that's October of forty. But already Ernest Couneil was
at war, he was already working with the British spies
at Rockefeller Center. So Roosevelt, who was a masterful politician,
he was able to play three dimensional chess, as they say,
what he was saying publicly was different than what he
was the actions that he knew was necessary because war
(12:56):
was coming in some manner of form, and of course
did with the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Did we have many American spies during World War One
or any located in the United States or British spies.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
No, you know, it's part of this whole isolationist view
of America. This history of isolationist view also has to
do kind of with a disparagement of espionage, which is crazy.
You know, the Germans, the Russians certainly believed in espionage.
Winston Churchill from those earliest days was involved with spying
(13:30):
and such, so they all understood the importance. The Nazis
certainly understand they had spies here in the United States.
But even during the Roosevelts administration, there was a Secretary
of State Henry Stimpson who famously said that gentlemen do
not read the mail of other gentlemen, which was really
(13:52):
interesting for a variety of reasons, but it was crazy.
You need intelligence. If you are a superpower of big power,
or any nation of any size should be having some
level of intelligence gathering. That doesn't mean necessarily a covert
James Bond type of spy, but literally the gathering of intelligence,
(14:14):
the developing of sources. That was really the first step,
and that was impressed upon President Roosevelt, and he allowed
Ernest Cuneo to deal directly with the British spies, and
that kind of, in a way, starts the whole ball
rolling of modern American espionage. You know, it gets more
(14:35):
and more involved as the story goes on, but essentially
when Churchill decides to put those spies in Rockefeller Center,
up on the thirty sixth floor, right across the street
from Saint Patrick's Cathedral, with all these smart alec New
Yorkers walking past, thinking, oh, we know everything that's going on.
I'm a smarter you know, I'm a smarty pant New Yorker,
(14:55):
and they're all oblivious to the fact that up on
the thirty sixth floor is this big foreign spy operation.
And that operation was something that eventually Roosevelt realizes that
we had to follow, we had to model our own
espionage agency, and that began. That be really begins with
Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Well, before we get to Pearl Harbor, take Earnest out
of it for a moment. The British spies, who are
you know, in Rockefeller Center, which is I guess operating
in plain sight? That's a smart thing to do. Yeah, exactly,
much like working in the basement of the Library of Congress.
When you look at these spies in the simplest of
simple terms, what are they doing that is considered you know,
(15:38):
gathering intelligence? Are they receiving information from their spies in Europe?
Or what's the purpose of that group in Rockefeller Center.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Well, they're doing a couple of things. Initially, they get
permission to keep the supply lines open. Spare in mind,
Britain's at war is really important to have those supply
lines coming from America. So that was the way that
they got permission to set up this operation. But very
quickly it expanded into other things. It expanded into keeping
(16:10):
an eye on all the Nazi spies in the United States.
And there were not only some Nazi spies in particularly
in the New York area, but there was also a
number of German born immigrants who were sympathetic to Germany
in fact, and this isolationist group. There was a group
called America First and they were very much pro German
(16:35):
or certainly not anti German, and they had a big
rally and a kind of a quasi Nazi rally at
Madison Square Garden in nineteen thirty nine. About twenty thousand
people were at Madison Square Garden. It was like the
Nickgame here and it was something that was really amazing,
but it was indicative of just how America felt at
(16:56):
that time. There was not only isolations, but there was
a number of peopeople who were for the Germans. So
the British were keeping an eye on the Nazi spies there,
but they also expanded it because the number one thing
that Churchill wanted out of the spy operation was to
convince America to get into the war, because without America's
(17:17):
help they were going to everything was going to sink.
There was very much feared in London that the Nazis
were about to invade Great Britain and everything would be
over by that point, and so they set up a
propaganda arm at Rockefeller Center, and that was one of
the biggest things that Ernest Cutio was involved with. He
was involved with essentially taking various different aspects of the
(17:42):
British views of everything from polling. At one point they
had an astrologer who they imported from London and Ernest
set up a press conference to have this astrologer who
had been a vaudevillian over in England. But he was
a phony astrologer, but he predicted the death of Hitler
because they knew that Hitler followed the British believed that
(18:05):
he was making military decisions. Hitler is making military decisions
based upon the stars, based upon this astrological chart, and
so they had this astrologer come over and it was
Couneo who set up a press conference. This astrologer said
Hitler's going to die, and that got headlines all around
the world. So there were a lot of things like that.
(18:26):
One last thing is that the British also got involved
in elections, which is another factor that's very much we
are concerned about. We hear about Russian interference, foreign interference
with our elections, and indeed the British did get involved
in the nineteen forty congressional campaigns. They went after a
number of different isolationists candidates, both of whom were Republican
(18:49):
and some Democrats. There was a Democrat in the area
where Roosevelt was from, in the Poughkeepsie, New York area,
they went after him, and by that they actually went
to the scene. They actually helped with some rallies. But
they also got involved in polling and surveying, and there
was like a phony poll, a survey that the British
(19:09):
set up that Cunio was very actively involved. I had
all these documents from Cuneo's papers that explain this. But
they did a survey in the nineteen forty Democratic and
Republican national conventions, a survey of how many delegates favored
intervention into the war. Now, most of those people that
(19:30):
were attending congresspeople and such, their letters were saying, don't
send my kids a war. We don't want to, we
don't want to get involved in a foreign war. And
yet the survey magically said that most delegates to both conventions,
Republican Democrats, the favored getting involved in the war. And
that serve that phony survey was reported by a number
(19:52):
of different major newspapers, the New York Times, the Herald
Tribune and such, and it's all laid out in my
in my book. I have the documents that were part
of that. They're up at the FDR library. Kunio's papers
are there and they described a lot that you can
see from the correspondence. How you know exactly what they did.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
This might be another slight deviation from what we're talking about.
But I have a question, because I've researched some about
nativism in the eighteen hundreds, what do you think the
difference was between somebody who is in the nineteen thirties
or forties who I mean, I think FDR is looking
at as the difference between somebody who is an isolationist
(20:35):
and somebody who is a nativist in the United States.
Is there a large difference between the two in the
thirties or forties.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah, I think there was a difference, although they did
overlap certainly. But the Nativists, the No Nothing Party, they
were fundamentally anti immigrant. You know, I've done books. I
did a book about twenty five years ago about the
Kennedys about their Irish Catholic immigrant experience and how it
affected them. Public lives, and that's a big part of
(21:02):
that story. So basically that native is was anti immigrant.
That's fundamentally what that was about. The isolationists was to
some extent had its roots in George Washington's farewell address
that he warned about foreign entanglements, and there was a view.
(21:23):
I don't know if it was a conservative view or whatever,
because I think a lot of liberals share this view
as well, that why are we getting involved in Vietnam,
for instance, or why are we getting involved in Iraq? Why?
And we certainly see that these days now. Of course
that comes back to bite us in the proverbial rear ends,
and that certainly we saw that with Hitler that we
just could not Hitler was not going to go away,
(21:46):
and Roosevelt knew that, but he what he had to do,
like any good politicianist kind of lead the populace to
recognizing the reality. And so there was a distinction between
the name of this view and this isolationist view.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
I mean, you bring up so many things for me
I researched. I once wanted to do a book on
Boss Tweed, who is you know, of course, a very
corrupt politician, Damminy Hall in the late eighteen hundreds, but
also on Thomas nast Sure, the cartoonist who was a
just incredible nativist, and some of his you know, cartoons
and sketch's political cartoons were of course very anti Irish. Okay,
(22:25):
So I think we started talking about Pearl Harbor. You said,
that's where something's changed. Was that maybe the view shifting
of the public of whether we should be involved.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, it was the blatancy of that attack, kind of
nine to eleven like for today's audience. It was a
shocking event. And so that was the turning point. That's
where we immediately entered the war. And in fact, shortly thereafter,
Churchill comes over to the United States. He spends Christmas,
(22:58):
the Christmas holidays that year, this is in nineteen forty
one with FDR, and they literally map out their plans
for the how to prosecute the war in Europe. And
so this was when Churchill heard about Pearl Harbor. He
said to his son Randolph, essentially his prayers had been answered.
(23:18):
Now the United States would get involved, and now we
would be saved because Britain had been at warf by
that point for about two and a half years.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Now, you said, I think in the book that Ernest
had acted as sort of this liaison between the British
spies in Rockefeller Center and you know, the brain trust
with FDR, and then there's Churchill. How does that exactly work?
I hear that. You know, Ernest can do some pretty
amazing things, as you said, like an influencer and has
(23:47):
all of these great ideas, particularly with spinning the media
and the public. But what were his actual sort of
job duties.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Well, to some extent, you know, it's funny because he'd
definitely liked to keep it somewhat so that he couldn't
necessarily be pinned down with In fact, at one point
he decided not to accept a paycheck with the Office
of Strategic Services, just so that he would be free
to do what be on his own, to some extent
(24:14):
that he was almost like a free agent. Specifically, he
started by working with the British at Rockefeller Center. It
was there that, for instance, that he met two very
important people in his life. Subsequently, Ian Fleming, who created
James Bond, who was also a British spy there, and
he met a Canadian spy there by the name of
(24:36):
Margaret Watson, who eventually becomes Cuneo's wife. There's kind of
a romance there, and that was also one of the
things that kind of like pulled me as a writer
to the book, this kind of romance at Rockefeller Center.
I actually I actually proposed to my wife at Rockefeller Center.
So yeah, so it kind of grabbed my eye there.
(24:57):
But his job was to deal at first with the Brits,
and then as things moved along, he was planting stories.
I mean, the Brits were a great source of stories
for Walter Winchell, his boss. The main source of money
for Ernest Cooney. It was not so much what he
was getting from the government, but what he was getting
as a fees, legal fees. He was a very good
(25:20):
libel lawyer, for instance, and working for Walter Winchell paid
him a lot of money in those days. And then
also so did Drew Pearson. Pearson had been a if
you're familiar with Jack Anderson, it's the same column. It's
called the Washington Merry Go Round and it was a
very famous investigative before Woodward and Bernstein. This was the
(25:41):
column where people would look for the dirt in Washington.
And it was Drew Pearson who started Drew Pearson as
a young man was a Columbia teacher and one of
his students was Ernest Cuneo. So they were like these
very interesting personal connections that Cuneo had. But as time
went on, Cuneo's portfit just got wider and wider, so
(26:03):
that he is working with the Brits, he's working with
the various different media people, but also he's working with
the FBI because he knows and has actually gone out
with Winchell and others. With the FBI head Jaya good Hoover.
They would go to a place called the Store Club
where Winchall had his own table there and it was
(26:25):
very famous. All these Broadway and movie people were there,
so he knew Hoover. Hoover became famous because of Winchell
and Hoover running after gangsters, so he knew Hoover. You know,
Cuneo knew Hoover, he knew The National Security Advisor from
Roosevelt was a guy named Adolph Burle who was his
(26:46):
title was Assistant Secretary of State, but he essentially was
the national what we call now the National Security Advisor.
And Burl had been Punio's teacher at Columbia, So you know,
it was kind of an interesting world that he knew.
He knew that people in the Justice Department, he knew
a couple of Supreme Court in Washington. There was a
(27:06):
building it was called the Armatage and it's where a
number of top people with power had They had little
apartments there when they were in Washington, and Cuneo had
enough funds that he also had an apartment there. So
you know, a lot of these things are done over drinks,
over lunch. So that's how more and more Cuneo's portfolio expanded.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Well, how tight of an operation is this? I mean,
you've mentioned quite a few people who are involved, which
I'm sure is normal. But you know, you've got some
newspaper folks, and you know that it seems wide ranging,
including a assuming attractive female Canadians. Buy was this considered
a really good safe operation or you know, was this
(27:53):
sort of not as tightly organized as it could have been.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
No, it's definitely dangerous. In fact, Margaret Watson was a
young woman late twenties who was one of many women
from the Winnipeg area in Canada who were recruited to
work at Rockefeller Center by Churchill's top spy his name
was William quote unquote Intrepid. That was kind of his
code name, William Intrepid Stevenson, and Stevenson had been a
(28:20):
war hero. He was trusted by Churchill. He recruited a
number of young women from Canada to work there. In
the case of Margaret Watson, she had this photographic memory.
According to both I interviewed both Cuneo's children. They were
adults when I interviewed them. She had a photographic memory.
There were other women who, did you know, some very
(28:42):
functionary type of job, secretary jobs and stuff like that.
But there were others who were real spies out there
in the field spies. One of the more interesting characters
was a woman whose code name was Cynthia Amy Pack
was her real name, and she was a woman who
basically used her her sexual attractiveness to compromise foreign dignitaries
(29:05):
in Washington. And there's an older woman who worked out
a Rockefeller Center for the Churchill spies who was her
handler as they call it. But Cynthia, and I tell
some of the stories of Cynthia in my book The
Invisible Spy. But she is a fascinating character, needless to say,
using her sexual wiles to get secrets out of foreign
(29:28):
dignitaries and such. Conversely, there was actually some male spies
that had a similar talent as well. One of them
is Raul Dahl, the children's book author, who was a
British spy. Oh I didn't know that, yes, And he
was very attractive to women for that magical reason that
(29:51):
that kis myth that happens between people, and he had
a number of affairs that were aimed at helping elicit
information from key people, one of whom was a congresswoman
named Claire booth Loose that raw Dahl had an affair with.
Claire booth Loose was married to Henry Loose, who owned
(30:11):
Time magazine and Life magazine, and she was very prominent,
as was her husband. But she had an affair with
Raul Dall so much so and they were so active
that a certain point Raudall complained to the British spies
superiors saying I'm exhausted, I can't do this anymore. And
(30:32):
he won it off. And as the story goes, the
spymaster in charge of Doll said, well, did you ever
see that movie The Henry the Eighth where he says
the things I must do for England. Well, that's exactly
your position, the things you must do for England. So
you know, it was just an interesting time period. Of
(30:52):
all these different characters. The female spies at Rockefeller Center
were almost as interesting or just as interesting as the
male spy. And I guess the one that was most
important to Ernest Cuneo was Ian Fleming because they become
lifelong friends. With the start of the war.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Okay, so you had said with Pearl Harbor, the public
sentiment starts to change towards the United States getting involved, right.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Majorly, like nine to eleven, you know, the way it
just catapults things.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
But Ernest had figured out some ways to sort of
boost this, you know, kind of tricking around with Poles
to say, you know that the congressional sentiment is more
leaning towards getting involved, right and all of this, when
do things heat up for them? I mean more than
is there anything that happens that's more than sort of
the you know, these placing of these stories things that
(31:46):
feel like they're really making a huge shift or is
it a tiny lots of little amounts of shifts that
just end up having a big influence.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
There's really kind of like two periods. There's a period
from the summer nineteen forty when Churchill comes to power
and they set up things at Rockefeller Center, and then
bear in mind it's almost so that's in the summer
of forty about a year and a half almost until
Pearl Harbor happens in December of nineteen forty one. So
that's part of things. The British spies were very active.
(32:18):
In fact, I begin my book with a circumstance where
two Nazi spies are walking through Times Square, the heart
of Manhattan in New York City, and with them is
a satchel containing papers planning how they're going to blow
up Manhattan in the event that America finally gets into
the war. And so they're walking and one of the
(32:40):
Nazi spies is hit by a car. What happens is
the other spy walking with him, instead of attending to
his colleague and these fatal injuries that he had, he's
literally bleeding out is that ran over his head and such. Instead,
he picks up the satchel of papers and he runs
off good spy. So the cops show up at the scene,
(33:01):
right the New York City cops and the dead man
his papers say that he's a Spaniard and he's got
these phony Spanish papers. So the cops check. The New
York City cops check with the Spanish consulate and they say, no,
there's no record of this guy. We don't know who
this guy is. And so the cops go to the
FBI Jague Hoover. Hoover doesn't know who it is. But
(33:24):
eventually what happens is they are in contact with the
British spies at Rockefeller Center and they know who this
sky is and how do they know how this guy is. Well,
one of the operations that they have is that in Bermuda,
at the Princess Hotel in Hamilton in the basement. It's
(33:45):
a very fancy hotel, but they had an operation where
the mail that were being sent from America to Europe
would go through Bermuda. Bear in mind, you know, they
would fly it over and such, but they would go
through the mail and they were able to and it
was tons of people involved in this operation, but they
were able to spot a letter by the guy who
(34:06):
ran away from the scene. The other Nazi spy who survived,
the one with the satchel. He wrote back to his
superiors in Germany, but in a letter, and it detailed
what happened, and so they were eventually able to find
out where that Nazi spy was living. They traced the
addresses and such, and so the FBI sets up this
(34:27):
manhunt on this guy and for a while they just
watch him, and he has all these other different spies
that are related. So eventually the FBI comes up with
I think they indicted something like fifteen people eventually as
part of that spy ring. And so the Brits were
way more advanced than either the FBI or the New
(34:48):
York City Police at that time period. I start my
book with that case because it also illustrates just how
clueless we were about espionage at the beginning of World
War Two and just how advanced the British war.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Now, how does Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond,
come into all of this, because I know they become
very good friends, he and Ernest, and also what Ernest
does inspires Fleming, you know for the James Bond series.
So does this come in the middle of World War two?
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Is that what happened in the beginning actually before Pearl Harbor? Okay,
So Ian Fleming is this very suave guy. You know,
you'll see pictures of Ian Fleming with these cigarette holders,
and he's a thin, very astude. He's a writer and
Cutio is definitely a writer, but he's also a lawyer.
But Cutio is a different that guy. He looks like
(35:42):
a human refrigerator if you will. I mean, he's like
five foot nine. He was a lineman in the NFL.
So this is by nineteen forty he meets Ian Fleming,
so they're very two different characters. Fleming is working for
British intelligence and he's a very smart and creative guy.
He's working for a very powerful admiral. Admiral Godfrey was
(36:07):
his name, and so Fleming is involved with coming up
with a number of different operations. There's a play of
musical right now in Manhattan called Operation Mincemeat. It's a
play the origins of Operation Minsweet, which was using a
corpse to throw off the Nazis, and the corpse is
found by the Nazis determine that the invasion is going
(36:30):
to take place in one place and instead it's going
to take place another place in Italy, and so that
was Fleming's idea, but he was also very creative in
other respects. And so he and Cuneo, even though there
were very different men, ones of brit ones of American,
different looking, they like to go out and party, they
(36:52):
liked to have fun, they liked women, They like going
out to nightclubs. Their scenes at the fellow who ran
the Churchill Spies, his name was William Intrepid Stevenson. They
would come up to his he had like this duplex
in Manhattan with a big fireplace, and they'd be sharing drinks.
And in Cuneo's memoirs there's some of the exchanges that
(37:16):
he had with Fleming that I repeat in my book.
But they become friends and so. And what's interesting is
that after the war, you know, most people went their
separate ways, they remained friends. In fact, they went into
business together. They created they were involved in a newspaper
syndicate company called NANA was short. It was North American
(37:39):
Newspaper Alliance. But it was a company where they would
have syndicated columnists and such. But it was also a
way of keeping in contact with the intelligence world and such.
So Fleming worked out of London for this company and
Cutio ran it in New York. But they were Buddies.
There was another friend, like a childhood friend of Ian
(38:01):
Flemings's name was Iver Bryce, and Iver was a very
wealthy man, and the three of them basically ran this
company together. Eventually, somewhat on a lark. Finally Fleming he
had talked for years about writing a novel, and so
he finally writes the novel. It comes out, and the
character's name is James Bond. It's name for an autobond expert,
(38:26):
but in any event, he comes up and it's basically
James Bond is patterned on William Stevenson, the guy who
was running the Churchill Intrepid Intrepid exactly and actually there
are scenes in the first James Bond novel that actually happened.
They were kind of exaggerated versions of what happened at
Rockefeller Center that's in Casino Royale. But then eventually, with
(38:52):
that first James Bond novel, Fleming realizes that he needs
to know more about America because he really only knows
America through manhe Night Spots and such, and also with Washington,
d C. But he doesn't know the rest of America.
So he prevails on Coutio to go out and they
go out to Chicago and they go out to Las Vegas.
(39:14):
Cuneo has sources out in Las Vegas, the casinos, and
eventually they go out to Hollywood. But some of those
scenes are in James Bond books like Diamonds Are Forever.
And in fact, the one where I guess Cuneo had
the most impact was on Thunderball. It was a very
popular novel and very popular movie with Sean Connery. The
(39:36):
movie treatment for that was actually written by Cutio. In fact,
Fletting wanted Cuneo to play the bad guy who was
supposed to be a mobster, and as an Italian American,
Cuneo didn't want to have anything to do with with
that type of slur on the Italian people, and so
(39:57):
of course they got other actors and such. But Fleming
dedicated Thunderball the novel to Cuneo. He says, to Ernest
Cuneo my muse, and he provided a lot of different ideas.
I thought one of the most fun parts of my
book is that trip, that cross country trip that Cuneo,
the American and Ian Fleming, the creator of this British
(40:20):
spy James Bond, just going out there and who they
meet and how he learns about America.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
What were the things that you said were kind of
exaggerated in James Bond, but that were inspired by Ernest
and his work. Were there any kind of like direct
correlations where you could say, oh, my gosh, oh yeah,
what's a good example.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
In Casino Royale, there was a scene that was based
upon a real life circumstance in which Fleming. This is
early before Pearl Harbor, but when the British are at
Rockefeller Center, there were a number of other countries that
had consulates in the Rockefeller Center area, including the Japanese.
And one night, this is what happened in real life life,
(41:00):
is that Stevenson decided in the middle of the night
to break in to the Japanese consulate office, break into
their Somehow they were able to get the codes for
the safe there, and they were able to take out
the code papers, the cipher papers and sets the codes,
take them, go up to their offices up on the
(41:21):
thirty sixth floor, make copies of these code papers and
then put them back in the safe of the Japanese.
And Flevty loved that idea. He just loved, you know,
he just loved adventure and all that type of stuff,
and Stevenson was the person who would do those type
of things. He was he would push the envelope, as
they say. So that was a real the real life experience.
(41:45):
He took that and he exaggerated it in Casino Royale
where James Bond actually assassinates a Japanese cipher expert through
the window. He's up, he's up on one of the
buildings Ackefeller Center, and he shoots through the window and
kills this Japanese cipher expert in this envisioned version of
(42:09):
what actually happened in real life, or it was kind
of based upon real life. But Fleming, just with James Fond,
he let's say, made into a more memorable violent episode.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
I didn't realize that Ian Fleming has any I just
thought he was an author. I guess I didn't know
that he had some background in you know, espionage is
his just briefly, what was Fleming's background before he decided
to stop and do a novel, just your average British spy.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
No, quite the contrary. He was a writer. He saw
this as a way of it's just a very interesting life.
And you know, he was one of those things that
in other words, getting involved. He was in naval intelligence,
so he was an officer. There's pictures of Ian Fleming
after the war. He has a couple of different jobs.
He eventually one of the jobs is he winds up
(42:58):
becoming the London representative for Cuneo's company that he Cunio
was running in New York, this Nana company, the newspaper syndicate.
But Fleming fundamentally was a writer, but he had not
tried his hand with the James Bond novels, and they
didn't come out until I think fifty three was the
first one, and then over time they became more and
(43:19):
more popular. The James Bond novels were particularly made popular
when President Kennedy took office in nineteen sixty one, and
there were interviews with people and they said, what are
some of your favorite books, and he said the James
Bond books. In fact, Jackie Kennedy was also a big
proponent of She liked the James Bond books as well
(43:41):
that her husband was reading. And she sent a copy
of one of the James Bond books to Alan Dulles,
who was then the head of the CIA, and said,
you know, you should read this book. And then actually
there was some pressure on the CIA to try to
come up with the gadgets that you see in these
James Bond movies, know, the exploding cigars, all these other
(44:03):
different killing devices. They would see these movies in the
Kennedy administration say well, well, CIA, can you think you
can maybe come up with something like this? And so
Leming had remarkable success. He really captured the time, and
obviously it became a big franchise.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Tell me a little bit before we kind of talk
about post war stuff with Cunia. What is Ernest's relationship
with Margaret Watson? Like, I know that they eventually get married.
So these two spies decided to have children. I don't
know if that seems like a great idea, but this
must have been post spy for them. I guess yeah,
it was.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Well, I think, you know a lot of people after
World War Two, after depression, suffering through the depression, and
then having five years four years of World War a
lot of people dying, there were a lot of people
eager to go back and go home and create families
and such. Margaret Watson was a fascinating character. As I mentioned,
she had a photographic memory. She was apparently involved in
(45:03):
some of the financial aspects. And there's a story that
her children, both her son and her daughter, both of
them are very distinguished attorneys. In fact, the son, John Kutio,
I dedicate my book to him. It's one of the
people I dedicate my book The Invisible Spy to him,
but he just recently died. But both of them told
(45:23):
me a story about their mother. There was a point
at which some type of Nazi spy broke into the
dormitory where Watson and a number of other female spies
working for that Churchill operation Rockefeller Center where they lived.
It was nearby Rockefeller Center, and somehow they broke in.
It's not really clear exactly why they keyed in on
(45:44):
Margaret Watson, but the spy actually put a pillow over it.
She was trying to go to sleep, and then he
broke in, tried to smother her, and she broke free.
She yelled for help, and they took care of the
person that broke in. Clearly had a German accent, that
was the one thing that was very clear, uh, And
they took care of him, as they say. So that
(46:06):
was kind of an interesting thing. The idea of this
woman from like a lot of the Canadian women who
were working as Churchill's spies of Rockefeller Center. You know,
they had come from relatively rural areas, a relatively small
populated areas, and to come to the big city that
was a that was a big thing for them. With
Ernest Cuneo, I think what she's what Margaret Watson saw
(46:31):
in Earnest was and again she was. They were very
different personalities, but Cooneo knew everybody, it seemed. She would
go out to the nightclubs with Ernest, she would meet
all these famous people like Walter Winchell. He really knew
this whole new world, this fascinating world of Manhattan, and
(46:51):
that was a big part of I think their romance.
Uh there. And and so when the war ends, they
decided to get married. For Ernest Cuneo, he had been
married before he was on the rebound, as both his
children told me, he had been married to somebody had
met at Columbia and it just wasn't working out, and
they divorced just before the war. But Margaret Watson was
(47:15):
somebody that really became his lifelong partner. They formed a
family together.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
He just died a couple of decades thirty years ago.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Maybe, yeah, I'm sorry. As far as the chronology, Ernest
graduated I believe like in twenty eight twenty nine somewhere
in that ballpark, and his wife Zilda was her name.
They were married for about eight years, so they get
divorced in like thirty eight thirty nine, somewhere in that ballpark.
(47:46):
There was apparently another woman that I mentioned briefly in
the book. I couldn't get any more details about that,
but there apparently was another woman. But fundamentally it just
didn't work out. Cunea was working for the president. When
you work for somebody like that, you're working all the time,
you're away from the home. I don't know what other
(48:07):
private problems that were between it, but they divorced, and
so by the time that Ernest is meeting Margaret Watson,
that would have been probably sometime in either late forty
or more likely or sometime in nineteen forty one. What
was interesting to me was Stevenson, who was the top
(48:28):
spy for Churchill at Rockefeller Center. He had brought all
these young women into the spy operation there, and so
they were very careful about telling women not to get
involved and not to disclose information about what was going on,
and be very wary of who they were talking to,
because you would never know if they were somehow going
(48:48):
to be compromised by some other foreign agent or whatever.
In the case of Margaret Watson, I interviewed both her
children and I asked, was Stevenson kind of encouraging this
relationship between Watson, Margaret and Ernie that in other words,
it was really important for the Churchill Spies to have
(49:12):
Ernest Cuneo as their friend, working on their behalf, talking
to the White House on all these different things. He
was making all these things happen for him. He was
the go between between the British and the White House,
and so to have a young woman who Ernest clearly likes.
Did Stephenson kind of push this on? Did he encourage
(49:36):
this relationship with beyond just romance? Was it somehow manipulating
these two young people? And it's interesting because they weren't
really sure. They didn't think so, But the daughter of
Ernest Cuneo said, well, I know for a fact though
my mother would not have done anything without the okay
of Stevenson. So I think it was something that was
(50:00):
just a fortuitous thing that happened, that this romance with
this vital American connection Ernest Cuneo was taking place.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Was helpful, apparently very helpful. Okay, what is post war
like for them? Until you know they both die? We
have these two kids, you know, everybody's coming home. Is
this the end of spying? Do they go? Does he
go back to lawyering? What happens?
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Well, he did go back to lawyering. He made a
bundle working for Winchell and for Drew Pearson in the
media as a libel lawyer and legal counsel, an advisor
just in general made a lot of money. Winchell was
the highest pay by far, the highest paid person in
the media. But also he set up this company that
he's working with, Ian Fleming. It was a way for
(50:49):
getting together. In fact, Fleming and Iver Bryce. They would
go up to a place that Iver Bryce had up
in upstate New York and they would hang out and
they had a high old time hanging out together. This
is after World War Two. But Ernest never severs his
ties to people like Alan Dulles. Alan Dulles was the
(51:10):
head of the CIA, but he actually began at Rockefeller Center.
He had been a lawyer. He began, and he was
a very successful spy for the United States. They eventually
sent him over to Switzerland, and that's where Dulles was
a particularly effective spy for them. But he began at
Rockefeller Center and he knew he actually was involved in
(51:31):
an operation that Cuneo actually came up with the idea
for it. So Cutio never severed those ties with Dulles,
and so he would be what they call in the
CIA terminology, he was an asset. He was somebody that
always had his eyes and ears and whatever he saw.
If he saw people that he thought might be Russian
double agents and such, he would report that to Dulles,
(51:55):
and so he kept that. One of the most extraordinary
things in my book is a couple of FBI memos
that had never been apparently has never been reported about before.
But when John F. Kennedy is assassinated, President Kennedy is
assassinated in nineteen sixty three, Alan Dulles has put on
(52:16):
the Warren Commission. There were seven members of it, and
Alan Dulles at some point during the deliberations while they're
investigating the president's murder, he wants to make clear that
somehow the CIA is not to blame for that, you know,
somehow they didn't protect Kennedy from the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
(52:36):
And so there are apparently Dulles was leaking information to
Ernest Cuneo, who planned to write almost a book like
the twenty thousand word magazine article for a magazine called
The Saturday Evening Post. And so he's leaking this information
to Cuneo Dulles's and Cuneo then goes to Hoover, who
(53:00):
he knows as well, and he's trying to see if
he can get Hoover to cooperate in this. And Hoover
is smart enough to realize, wait a minute, the President
of the United States doesn't want anybody talking about this
investigation of Kennedy's murder. This is the Warren Commission in
the middle of this investigation, and so they write these memos.
(53:22):
It's kind of what they call a cover your ass memo.
And basically the memos and I quote these in my book,
is by Hoover and his number two at the FBI.
They say, Ernest Cuneo's come in and apparently Alan Dulles
is leaking to him about what's going on at the
Warren Commission, and we told him, you know, we like you, Ernest,
(53:43):
but we can't tell you anything. We can't get involved
in this, and we're very firm. And that's known in
bureaucratic terms as covering your ass. That it's basically memorializing
what happened, just so that they have a memory and
that they all can say, oh no, now that article
that Cuneo was preparing never ran. Who knows what happened.
(54:05):
There was a federal judge that also had worked for
the FBI, and Cuneo talked to him as well about
it because he thought that he might be able to
get information from the FBI through this judge. But it's
extraordinary because this is the first known leak by the
Warren Commission, and it comes back to Alan Dulles. And
what we already know historically is Dulles was not telling
(54:28):
the Warren Commission about the attempts to kill Cashtro by
the CIA. He kept that top secret. So people who
looked at the Warren who were on the Warren Commission,
like future President Gerald Ford, they had no idea that
the CIA was trying to kill Castro, and that Castro
has said, if you're trying to kill me. I can
go after you. He said that just shortly before the assassinations.
(54:52):
So Dulles we know who was already keeping things, but
these documents indicate he was also leaking to try to
been the story and try to basically get the cias
and his version of what was going on before the
actual printing of the Warren Report to the public.
Speaker 1 (55:10):
Well, at the end of the day, what do you
think was the meaning behind Ernest's work in all of this?
I mean, what's the big takeaway for you on why
his story was important enough for you to publish? You know,
and it's certainly not just the first American spy in
World War Two. There's a lot more to him. So
(55:32):
what was that?
Speaker 2 (55:33):
Well, a couple of things. What is Yes, Virginia, there
is a deep state. It's not as extensive or fictitious
as we hear some of the modern politicians you know
in our time period who are doing it mainly for
political purposes. But there are people in the government who've
been worked in key agencies who make things work. You
(55:57):
can call them fixers, but they're the ones. You know.
There will be people who make politicians and public officials
to say things to the public at press conferences. But
then there are people who really make it happen.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
Ray Cohen would be one of those people.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
You know, well, yeah, no, but even within government, I
mean in in a spy agency. You know, if you
ever watched the movie the TV show Homeland, Carrie the
main character, she's making things happen and such, there are
people in every agency that make things happen. So to
some extent, that was part of Cuneo's the importance of
people behind the scenes. So I've spent forty years as
(56:33):
an investigative reporter. One of the things you learn is
that sometimes it's the middle level people who know the
most of what's really going on. But also it underlines
the importance of espionage. Why it's so important that we
have people of good character involved in our intelligence operations,
(56:54):
not only in terms of gathering information, but to the
extent that we get involved in covert opirations, kind of
like the James Bond type of things. We're watching these
things very carefully. It's a tough job, it can be
a dirty job, but it's an essential job to keeping
the peace and being a powerful country. Espionage is really important.
(57:15):
Winston Churchill always knew that you didn't have to explain that.
But for the Americans, with this isolationist history, that's something
that keeps on coming back in our history. History gives
us a lot of lessons and it's a big takeaway,
you know. And I also thought it was interesting in
terms of Ernest Kuneo's very aware of being an Italian
(57:35):
American and one of the backdrops of my story is
just what it's like to be a kid of immigrant parents.
And you know, at times he was the kid with
the nose up against the glass looking into the higher
reaches of power, and he was not being invited. And
there he got in there eventually, but he was never
(57:58):
like a top player, always like the middle level player.
And so in fact, there's a scene in World War
Two in this book where they were talking about intering,
putting into camps Italian Americans who were born in Italy
but here in the United States because we were at
war with Mazsolini and the Italian government, and so there
(58:22):
was talk about it was about six hundred thousand Italian
Americans who they were seriously thinking of putting into camps,
just like we were interning Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast,
and Kutio got involved in that. He heard about it, he
acted upon it. He was a real advocate for Italian
Americans and argued against it, and he did so effectively.
(58:43):
He was one of the people that helped steer our
government's policy in that regard. So there's a lot of
parallels and we definitely can learn from history with a
story like Ernest Kunios.
Speaker 1 (59:04):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(59:29):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or Wherever you get your podcasts, Follow Wicked
(59:50):
Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked, and on Facebook
at wicked words pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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