from the article by Marc Wortman found here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/did-brits-kill-new-york-city-cops-to-get-us-into-wwii
For 77 years the culprits behind a July 4, 1940, terror bombing at the New York World’s Fair have never been found. Is this the answer?
“The sequence of events appears to tell a damning story: On June 4, 1940, Nazi Germany shoved the last British troop off the Continent at Dunkirk. Adolf Hitler moved his forces into position for a final cross-Channel invasion and occupation of England. That same month the new British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, dispatched a shadowy figure, Sir William Stephenson—later most famous as the original of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Agent 007—to set up a spy shop for Britain’s MI6 in Midtown Manhattan. A hero of World War One and self-made multi-millionaire, Stephenson was on neutral ground in America, but he and Churchill shared the conviction that nothing was more important to their nation’s chances for survival than winning American support for the war against Hitler. Then, on July 4, 1940, with throngs of holiday visitors at the New York World’s Fair, a time bomb planted in the British Pavilion exploded, instantly killing two New York City policemen and badly mauling five others. Was Stephenson behind the blast in an attempt to frame Nazis and their American sympathizers? Were these officers sacrificed to win American sympathy and draw a reluctant United States into the Second World War?”
“This past Independence Day marked the seventy-seventh anniversary of the unsolved crime. “It’s a cold case, but still an open case,” New York City Police Lieutenant Bernard Whalen tells me. He has scrutinized the original bombing case files while researching two books he wrote on the history of the NYPD. “There was a massive investigation at the time. The FBI was involved.” No effort was spared—except to get at those he believes were likeliest to have knowledge of the bomb, the security staff of the British Pavilion itself.”
“Although the United States was officially neutral, in the midst of a world at war, it was fast becoming a shadowy battlefield. New York teemed with spies, political agitators, and foreign agents, many with violence in mind for their enemies, some desperate enough to go to any length to sway American public opinion. While Whalen won’t pin blame on any single possible culprit, he says after his own studies of the case, “You could draw the conclusion that it was an inside job.” At one point the NYPD suspected as much, but were stopped from getting to the bottom of the case.”
David Pollack/Corbis/Getty
“Certainly, there was no better target at the time for a terror attack designed to cause large numbers of casualties and draw national public attention than the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair. It was in some respects the World Trade Center of its moment. Beginning in the spring and summer of 1939 and again in 1940, a total of 44,000,000 visitors—at a time when the population of the entire country was just 120,000,000 people—flocked to the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Three years in the making and spread across 1,216 acres of what had previously been an open-air garbage dump – the ash heap of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – the biggest exposition ever held cost $160 million to complete (equivalent to $2.3 billion today), not including a specially constructed elevated subway line and other new infrastructure, a phenomenal expenditure during the Great Depression. World’s Fair visitors saw “The World of Tomorrow,” the fair’s theme, including early television, self-driving cars, and robots, and strolled fairgrounds and pavilions dominated by futuristic icons and symbols, the Trylon and Perisphere, a 700-foot spire and an orb as wide as a city block through which visitors on a moving stairs viewed a model of the city of the future.
Sixty nations built national halls or set up exhibitions. Great Britain was there, with an original of the Magna Carta and the Crown Jewels on display; the Netherlands planted a million tulip bulbs and sent Vermeer’s ethereal “The Milkmaid” to the U.S. for the first time; and the Jewish Palestine pavilion stood as the first international structure of the proposed Jewish nation. The Soviet Union’s national pavilion, the fairground’s most grandiose, was dominated by a red marble tower, shorter only than the Trylon and topped by “The New Soviet Citizen,” a seventy-nine-foot-high gleaming steel statue of the ideal worker holding a red star. Despite their wars in Europe and Asia, Fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan were there. Among the major powers, only Germany stayed away.”
“…Anticipating war with Germany, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth made the first visit to the United States by British royals ever, making sure to stop at the World’s Fair. Before the first season ended, World War II had indeed begun and before the fair’s second season got underway, Poland, Lithuania, and Finland were gone, and before it ended, so too were France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. With the second season’s opening day approaching, Stalin’s Soviet Union, allied in a marriage of convenience with Hitler’s Germany for now, shut and razed its pavilion.”
“…World’s Fair goers nonetheless remained undaunted by the headlines emanating from a distant war. On the July 4, 1940, holiday, a huge crowd of close to 160,000 visitors circulated through the fairgrounds. In the afternoon at high tea time, some fifteen hundred people moved about inside the British Pavilion. An electrician noticed a small bag in an electrical control room on the upper floor. He could hear ticking coming from inside it.
Tensions overseas were boiling up in New York City streets and halls—sometimes leading to noisy protests and bloody fights. Many different groups and organizations carried out demonstrations, held rallies, and battled each other in the media and on the streets, on behalf and sometimes supported by Europe’s warring nations. Among various foreign agents and organizations, Stephenson’s new British Security Coordination alone enjoyed a protected status. Headquartered in offices labeled Passport Control at Rockefeller Center, his operation worked, illegally, with a sympathetic Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House to bolster American support for the British and also to attack German agents operating in the Western Hemisphere. One of Stephenson’s U.S. agents, Ian Fleming, later modeled his James Bond character on Stephenson, a man he described as “very tough, very rich, single-minded, patriotic, and a man of few words.” He had no hesitation about killing for his country’s survival, having done so as a fighter pilot in the First World War and having volunteered to assassinate Hitler in an eventually aborted plot before coming to America…”
Read much more at the full original article linked above, or wonder what kind of conspiracy might get WWIII started…
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