Stargazing, Spies and Clandestine Warmongering in World War II Last month the Israeli astrologer Miriam Binyamini predicted, based on her reading of the stars, that war between Israel and Iran is not imminent. Unsurprisingly, the forecast incited some mockery in the letters section of The Jerusalem Post. "Our defense forces and home front can now relax and breathe a deep sigh of relief," one correspondent wrote. However, despite our gratefulness to astrologer Binyamini for the above glad tidings, I feel she was morally remiss for not also activating her star-gazing skills for a matter of lesser importance, but still rather hurtful, when she failed to alert us to the rise of the dollar against the shekel. Most people (with the exception of Nancy Reagan on behalf of her husband) probably don't tend to look to the stars for direction on matters of warfare and geopolitics. But as I mention in the latest One-Page Magazine, British secret intelligence during World War II enlisted Louis de Wohl, "The Inconvenient Astrologer of MI5," to disseminate propaganda in the hopes of persuading Americans that the U.S. should enter the war against Hitler. Emma Garman offered a history of this bizarre campaign earlier this year at The Awl. Evidently de Wohl was "dispatched with instructions to present himself as a renowned astrologer with no connections to Britain, and to undermine America's belief" in the Hitler's invincibility. "'Seer Sees Plot to Kill Hitler,'" said a headline in The New York Sun, which reported de Wohl's prediction that Hitler would be "done away within a year." These kinds of machinations tend not to make the history books, but much more often than we realize, they're the stuff wars and coups are made of. See, for example, Cognito Comics' Operation Ajax, a graphic memoir of sorts for the iPad, with embedded newsreels and dossiers, about the C.I.A. plot that brought down Mossadegh in Iran. Recently I spoke with Garman, who has been researching Churchill's other covert efforts to draw the United States into the war, about the de Wohl campaign and others like it. You mention that de Wohl based some of his predictions on intelligence gleaned from MI5's cracking of the Enigma code, which was used by the Nazis to transmit secret military orders. Do you know how the Germans reacted? One of the ironies of de Wohl's job with British intelligence was that he promoted himself as indispensable due to Hitler's reliance on astrology. In fact, Hitler despised astrologers. But just as the British viewed Americans as gullibly susceptible to astro-predictions, Goebbels had the same idea about the English. So a Swiss astrologer employed in the Nazis' propaganda department, Karl Ernst Krafft, was instructed to make false prognostications of Nazi triumph. He refused, and was then arrested by the Gestapo during a clampdown on the practice of astrology. Meanwhile, de Wohl was telling U.S. journalists that Krafft, "Hitler's top astrologer," had predicted that the Nazis would lose. "Hitler's Stargazer Sees Heavenly Stop Light" ran the headline in The New York Sunday News. Not surprisingly, for the rest of the war, Krafft remained either imprisoned or under close Nazi supervision, and eventually died on the way to the Buchenwald concentration camp. A ridiculously specific prediction that was almost certainly based on intercepted Axis crypto-transmissions was de Wohl's announcement, on July 18, 1941, that the two S.S. field marshals leading the invasion of Russia, General Wilhelm Keitel and General Walter von Brauchitsch, were involved in a plan to assassinate Hitler. The New York Post - whose publisher, George Backer, was in cahoots with the British - published the story, then just days later, The New York Times confirmed that the pair had been removed from their posts. The Los Angeles Times published a front-page report on another very pointed prediction from de Wohl: that unless America joined in the effort to defeat the Nazis, Germany would invade the country via Brazil. You've been looking into other British schemes to drag America into the war. Is there anything else as unorthodox as the astrology gambit? The covert strategies employed by the British to force U.S. public opinion in their direction almost beggar belief. Particularly hair-raising were the expertly forged and highly publicized Nazi documents that made a German invasion via South America seem imminent. And the ingenious smear campaigns conducted against isolationist senators make today's political mudslinging seem amateur. How much did Roosevelt know about all this? It's a really interesting question. Roosevelt definitely knew about the broad strokes of the British conspiracy to bring America into the war, and he supported it, albeit tacitly. A whole lot went on behind his back, though, and he probably preferred it that way. It was a slightly different situation with F.B.I. chief, J. Edgar Hoover, who was more Anglophobic than Roosevelt. The head of British intelligence in New York, William Stephenson, was supposed to keep the F.B.I. apprised of all British activity, clandestine or otherwise. But Stephenson, ruthlessly dedicated to his cause and a law unto himself, was unwilling to work within the boundaries Hoover had set. F.B.I. agents "were never sure of whether they were getting the whole story," Hoover complained, "and they knew in many cases that they were not."