A Man Called Bill

Some news

My next book will be about the undercover British campaign to bring the US into the Second World War, and the enigmatic man at the heart of it, Bill Stephenson (pictured above). This is the same Stephenson made famous by the book A Man Called Intrepid, or infamous, you could say, on account of the book’s endless exaggerations and inaccuracies.

I’ve been wanting to write this book for years, partly because I’ve heard stories about Stephenson since I was a child. As I’ll explain in the book, shortly before the Second World War he saved my Dad’s life.

I’d know about that for a long time, but it was only in the wake of the last US presidential election, and the subsequent revelations about a nationwide Russian influence campaign, that I felt now was the time to write about this earlier British operation.

It turns out that the largest influence campaign ever launched on American soil was not run from Moscow. It was run out of the Rockefeller Center, it was British, and it peaked in the weeks before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The book will be published in Autumn 2019 by PublicAffairs in the US as Agents of Influence, and in the UK as Our Man in New York, where it will be published by Quercus.

Now I’ve just got to write it.

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