Ernest Cuneo didn’t look like your typical spy, says Edward Kosner in The Wall Street Journal: weighing more than 20 stone, and almost as tall as he was wide, he was virtually impossible to miss. But he was definitely effective. During World War Two, the former journalist and political fixer served as Franklin D Roosevelt’s secret liaison with the British Security Coordination office, Winston Churchill’s covert spy nest headquartered on an upper floor of the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Among the British spooks Cuneo encountered there was a young Ian Fleming, who later credited him for much of the plot of both Goldfinger and Thunderball, dedicating the latter to “Ernest Cuneo, Muse”.

For a secret agent, Cuneo was “quite the man about town”. He squired female friends to top nightclubs and fed “self-interested tips” to influential newspaper columnists. This restless social life helped him maintain a vast network of more than a thousand informants and tipsters: he even tapped the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward and Cary Grant for any titbits they might have heard in Hollywood. (“Celebrity was a wonderful cover!” Coward liked to proclaim.) All this helped Cuneo fit in at America’s own intelligence agency, the Office for Strategic Services. The organisation, a forerunner of the CIA, had so many prominent names on its books – from celebrity chef Julia Child to film director John Ford – that people joked “OSS” stood for “Oh So Social”.

🕵️‍♂️🇯🇵 Fleming proved himself particularly “adept at the spy game” in New York. He led a night-time raid on the Japanese consul-general’s office below them in the Rockefeller building, in which he and his team took a codebook and other secret papers up to their HQ to microfilm them, then put the material back “exactly as they’d found it”.

The Invisible Spy by Thomas Maier is available to pre-order here.

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The rest of today’s newsletter includes:

🔫 Where millionaires go to learn “badass skills”
🐴 Why “Trump-whispering” is futile and counter-productive
🏏 The “spine-tingling” new Andrew Flintoff documentary

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