‘The Invisible Spy' Review: Manhattan Project

Wall Street Journal

30-03-2025

Ernest Cuneo, a burly former Columbia football player who weighed in at nearly 300 pounds, was an unlikely spook—but an effective one. During World War II Cuneo served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secret liaison with a covert British spy nest—known only to FDR and a few members of his innermost circle—hiding in the heart of corporate New York City.
As Thomas Maier writes in 'The Invisible Spy: Churchill's Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America's First Secret Agent of World War II,' the British operation was unconventional, too, opaquely labeled the British Security Coordination Office and tucked away on an upper floor of Rockefeller Center, behind a door bearing the bland sign 'British Passport Control.'
The spy operation's mission—to get America's mighty armed forces into the war against the rampaging Axis powers—was vital to Britain's struggle for survival. 'The propaganda war,' Mr. Maier quotes Cuneo as saying, 'was fought with deadly ferocity, like a battle with thousands of tanks on each side locked in fierce, lethal combat, firing at point blank range. The moral hatred hung over the field like poison gas. No chivalry, no Geneva Convention, no code of military honor governed the war of words.' At its peak, the author tells us, Britain's spy operations in wartime America were more extensive than those of Germany or Russia.
Mr. Maier, a journalist and the author of 'Masters of Sex' (2009), 'When Lions Roar' (2014) and 'Mafia Spies' (2019), plunges the reader back into the dark, early days of World War II, when ultimate victory over the fascist onslaught seemed precarious at best.