By Thomas F. Schwartz
In Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath edited by George H. Nash, Hoover entitles a section “Brainwashing the American People.” He details President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to counter isolationist/non-interventionist sentiment by suggesting that Hitler was seeking world domination, not simply that of Europe. Citing numerous examples from FDR’s public addresses, the one that irked Hoover most was the October 27, 1941 address where Roosevelt claims: “ I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s Government—by the planners of the new world order….This map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.” In a footnote, Hoover wrote: “Four years later, after the German surrender, I was in Germany. The American Army authorities informed me they had been instructed to search for these plans. Our officials informed me there were no such plans in the captured German Files. Not only did the captured German records and the severe interrogations of their generals and political leaders show no such plans or intentions, but a search of our own departmental records disclosed not an atom of such information.” So, did FDR make up the story? Yes and no.
Roosevelt was aware of British Intelligence operating in the United States out of Rockefeller Center. Headed by the legendary spy-master William Stephenson who recounted his career in A Man Called Intrepid, the British Security Coordination [BSC] office kept tabs on what German and Soviet agents were doing in the United States. Stephenson was assisted by other agents who went on to later fame: Roald Dahl, author of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. At the beginning of WWII America had no dedicated intelligence service in place comparable to foreign governments. The closest thing was J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation that understood domestic intelligence gathering better than foreign intelligence. A new study of Ernst Cuneo, a lawyer but also unofficial go-between for the BSC and the White House details how FDR was fed information by British Intelligence on a regular basis by Cuneo. In this way, FDR could always claim “plausible deniability” without there being a paper trail or evidence of meeting with the British or Stephenson.
There have been several articles written arguing that the map FDR referred to in the October 1941 speech was, in fact, created by British Intelligence and fed to FDR through Cuneo. Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998) and more recently, Thomas Maier, The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II (2025) provide popular accounts of the phony invasion map. While no such map referenced by FDR ever existed, Norman J. W. Coda, Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path Toward America (1998) argues that some German military officials looked to create contingency plans for naval bases in Africa and off the coasts of France and Spain should an invasion of the Americas ever become feasible. Like most contingency plans, they were laid aside as the necessities of fighting the actual war consumed their attention.