Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage

The British would trade ASDIC for the Norden bombsight. Roosevelt responded that he would consider the deal, and it was consummated while the United States was still technically neutral.
    Tyler Kent, as he brooded in the airless silence of the code room translating messages into the State Department’s Gray code, fretted that FDR was “secretly and unconstitutionally plotting with Churchill to sneak the United States into the war.” He had developed a corollary obsession: “All wars are inspired, fomented, and promoted by the great international bankers and banking combines which are largely controlled by the Jews.” He had, he later admitted, “anti-Semitic tendencies for many years.” Kent finally decided where his duty lay. He had to gather evidence that he could place into the hands of the U.S. Senate and the American press to expose Roosevelt’s duplicity and keep the United States out of the war. Roosevelt, Kent believed, had to be stopped, especially since, it was rumored, he might run for an unprecedented third term. And so Kent began to steal and copy documents from the code room which he hid in his flat in a brown leather bag, a crate, and in the cupboard. He also managed to secure duplicate keys to the code room so that he could conduct his pilfering anytime day or night.
    Early in 1940, Kent had met thirty-seven-year-old Anna Wolkoff, not particularly attractive, but vivacious, witty, and worldly, the daughter of czarist émigrés. Her father had been an admiral in the czar’s navy and an attaché assigned to London at the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Anna’s mother had served as a maid of honor to the czarina. The revolution was the Wolkoffs’ undoing. The admiral and his wife had fled to London and now ran the Russian Tea Room, renowned for serving the best caviar in town. Anna owned a fashionable dress shop. She had a simple explanation for the Wolkoffs’ social dethronement, the gang of Communists, Jews, and Freemasons who had instigated the revolution. Tyler Kent had found a soul mate.
    Anna took her new friend to Onslow Square to meet a man who immediately impressed Kent. Captain A.H.M. Ramsay was a Sandhurst graduate, a wounded and decorated soldier in the First World War, a Tory member of Parliament, and a distant relative of the royal family. Further, he was a man convinced that his country was being taken over by a vast Jewish conspiracy. Ramsay had fought back by founding the Right Club, whose members blamed the world’s woes on Wolkoff’s villainous trio of Bolsheviks, Jews, and Masons.
    Though recognizing a kindred spirit, Kent found the old soldier politically naïve. The embassy clerk determined to enlighten Ramsay. He took him to his flat and spread before him a feast of classified documents. Ramsay was dazzled to be reading in a London bed-sitting room secret exchanges between Roosevelt and Churchill. Kent explained their underlying meaning, Churchill’s desire to draw America into this “Jew’s War” and Roosevelt’s obvious connivance in the scheme.
    On a visit to Kent’s room in March 1940, Anna Wolkoff asked him if she might borrow some of the purloined documents. Kent, knowing of Captain Ramsay’s interest, assumed she wanted to show them to the Englishman again, and agreed. Instead, she took the papers to a photographer friend of her father, who copied them. Wolkoff, of the aristocratic past, then gave the photos to a fellow patrician, Don Francesco Maringliano, duke of Del Monte, a lieutenant colonel in the Italian army posted to his country’s London embassy. The duke knew that what Churchill and the supposedly neutral FDR were secretly telling each other could prove invaluable to Italy and its Axis partner, Germany. The stolen information that he relayed to Rome was about to be intercepted itself by means the duke could not have predicted.
    Bletchley Park had been built nearly seventy