The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II

Ernest Cuneo was a man who ran in influential circles from the 1930s onward, serving as a staffer to future New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and as a junior member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust.” The former NFL player was a lawyer whose valuable legal advice garnered him famed clients such as journalists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell. As World War II raged, Cuneo would assume a far more significant position: a key intermediary between a British espionage operation and the nascent US intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services(OSS). As the British Security Coordination ran propaganda and covert operations against isolationists, fifth columnists and actual Nazis in the US, Cuneo passed information between BSC head William Stephenson and OSS head William Donovan. Cuneo’s role would remain hidden for many years because of his reticence, yet his assistance remained indispensable.

The Invisible Spy is an enthralling real-life spy thriller by journalist Thomas Maier(“Mafia Spies”). Ernest Cuneo was not your average covert operator, but he took to his patriotic mission with alacrity. Maier has written a comprehensive account of a political operator, litigator, friend, and confidant to both spy and celebrity who left his mark on the world.