It was while he was investigating the famously frosty relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt that he came across a corner of history that no one had really investigated. A reference to Churchill's dirty tricks led the novelist to a covert operation mounted by the British secret service in 1940-41 to manipulate and penetrate the news media in the U S to influence public opinion in favour of joining the war.
At the time 8 out 0f 10 Americans were against intervening in the fighting in Europe, and Churchill believed they had to be persuaded otherwise.
"Churchill was adamant when he became Prime Minister that if we didn't get the Americans involved we wouldn't win the war. He ordered this operation to be set up and provided the funds, and they were very succesful. ...
"That's why it became an embarassing secret after the war because they were our allies and we didn't want them to know that as many as 3000 agents were working in the U S on behalf of the British Secret Service."...
Eva is sent to America where she successfully plants false stories in American newspapers and radio stations claiming that Hitler has designs on Mexico and the war is coming to America's backyard. She also acts as a honey trap having an affair with one of President Roosevelt's keys advisors. According to [the author] everything Eva does in America both in the book and the television drama is based on real events.
"It's all documented in this extraordinary manuscript that I found about the British security coordination operation in the U S written by 4 or 5 of its former members. They only published 12 copies and 1 of them was for Churchill. It was an unofficial memoir of what they got up to. One of the authors was Roald Dahl who spent part of the war working at the head quarters at the Rockefeller Center in New York. It was astonishing what they got up to mounting smear campaigns about key members of the American isolationist movement. No wonder they had to brush it under the carpet. The Washington Post later described it as possibly one of the most successful covert operations in the history of espionage.
[Edited for typos. Originally a mixture of copy-typing and dictation.
