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Eighty years after the end of the Second World War fresh stories continue to emerge about the war's secret intelligence struggles. This is the case with The Invisible Spy, a new biography by Thomas Maier. A seasoned journalist, Maier is an author and Emmy award winning producer of the Showtime drama Masters of Sex and the 2024 Paramount docuseries Mafia Spies - both adapted from his non-fiction books.

The Invisible Spy explores the life and times of Ernest Cuneo, an obscure New York lawyer, who played an important wartime role for Anglo-American intelligence. The Brooklyn born Cuneo attended Columbia University where he played collegiate football and later professionally for two teams of the National Football League. At Columbia his passion for politics was ignited by a glittering array of instructors that included Drew Pearson, a future nationally syndicated columnist, who taught geopolitics, William O. Douglas, a law professor destined for the Supreme Court, and Adolf Berle, a foreign policy specialist, future State Department official, and member of Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust." Throughout the 1930s, Cuneo traveled on Democratic Party business, reconnecting with his old teachers, and meeting politicians, government officials, influential journalists and newspaper publishers.

These carefully cultivated contacts became critical for Cuneo, beginning in April 1940. With Great Britain at war, London dispatched William Stephenson, a wealthy Canadian businessman, to Washington on a desperate mission to secretly drag America into the conflict on the side of the Allies. As Maier writes "over the next several months, Stephenson began to assemble what would become the largest foreign espionage operation ever conducted inside the United States" with Cuneo, a civilian suddenly turned spy, acting as his "constant source of contact with the American government.”

Mater draws on Cuneo's unpublished memoir and reminiscences of his two children. Secondary sources include The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940 - 1945 written by Stephenson's aide, H. Montgomery Hyde, and The Quiet Canadian, Hyde's 1962 biography of his boss. The author's reliance on Hyde occasionally proves dodgy as evidenced by his description of a now discredited meeting between FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and British double agent Dusko Popov. A Cuneo/Stephenson conversation in 1940 or 1941 discussing V2 rocket attacks on London - three years before Hitler deployed them, is also problematic.

Under Stephenson's guidance, according to Maier, Cuneo became a secret propagandist feeding a diet of factual and bogus stories highlighting British heroism and discrediting Roosevelt's anti-war opponents to selected journalists. They included Pearson and Walter Winchell, a popular radio commentator, and gossip columnist with a nationwide audience.

America’s entry into the war redirected Cuneo into the delicate role of liaison with the Office of Strategie Services (OSS) and an often-hostile FBI and departments of Justice, State, and War. Later, he undertook new tasks after joining the OSS. Also of interest was Cuneo's wartime collaboration and life-long friendship with lan Fleming, creator of James Bond, the fictional British master spy.

The Invisible Spy is a crisply written tale that offers new details to our understanding of the Anglo-American wartime partnership. Historians and general readers alike will find it an interesting read.

Dr. Raymond J. Batvinis is a historian and retired FBI agent who studies counterintelligence issues. His latest book, Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History, recounts the life of William Weisband, an American codebreaker who spied for the Russians at the dawn of the Cold War. Dr. Batvinis maintains the website fbistudies.com and can be contacted at rbatvinis@aol.com.