Thomas Maier: The Invisible Spy

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 This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories.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 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 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?

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 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.

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, 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, 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.

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.

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, 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 about the whole growth of American espionage and that's a remarkable story in and of itself.

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

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 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 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. 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.

was Boss Tweed. When this was happening. FDR knew, you know, 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.

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. 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.

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 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,

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 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, 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.

Or what's the purpose of that group in Rockefeller Center.

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 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 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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, 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.

that's where something's changed. Was that maybe the view shifting of the public of whether we should be involved.

so this was when Churchill heard about Pearl Harbor. He said to his son Randolph, essentially his prayers had been answered. 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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

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 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 spy James Bond, just going out there and who they meet and how he learns about America.

And one night, this is what happened in real life life, 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 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. 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 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.

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 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 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

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.

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

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 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 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 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 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 somebody that really became his lifelong partner. They formed a family together.

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 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

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 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 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 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 just a fortuitous thing that happened, that this romance with this vital American connection Ernest Cuneo was taking place.

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 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 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, 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

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. 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 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.

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, 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. 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 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.

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.

to say things to the public at press conferences. But then there are people who really make it happen.

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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked, and on Facebook at wicked words pod