William Boyd: The Secret Persuaders

It was 1940, the Nazis were in the ascendant, the Blitz at its deadliest, and Britain's last hope was to bring a reluctant United States into the war. So it was that the largest covert operation in UK history was launched. William Boyd sheds light on a forgotten spy ring.

"British Security Coordination". The phrase is bland, almost defiantly ordinary, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact BSC, as it was generally known, represented one of the largest covert operations in British spying history; a covert operation, moreover, that was run not in Occupied France, nor in the Soviet Union during the cold war, but in the US, our putative ally, during 1940 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor and the US's eventual participation in the war in Europe against Nazi Germany.

When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he realised immediately - if he had not realised before - that he had to achieve one thing in order to ensure that Britain was not defeated by Hitler's Germany: he had to enlist the US as Britain's ally. With the US alongside Britain, Hitler would be defeated - eventually. Without the US (Russia was neutral at the time), the future looked unbearably bleak. Roosevelt, as president, was predisposed to help - after a fashion and for cash on delivery - but the situation in America was overwhelmingly isolationist. One easily forgets this, in the era of our much-vaunted, so-called "special relationship", but at the nadir of Britain's fortunes, polls in the US still showed that 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention.