Weighing nearly 300 pounds and almost as tall as he was wide, former college and NFL lineman Ernest Cuneo was virtually impossible to miss.

The imposing Columbia Law School graduate was brash, beloved by the most famous journalists, and a constant presence in New York bars – drinking cocktails and dotting conversations with phrases from his football career.

But at the same time, he managed to remain invisible, and it was a testament to how well he served his country in secret.

Cuneo’s physical presence was enormous in public, but it was even bigger in the shadows during the darkest years of American history.

The Italian-American lawyer was the United States’ first secret agent in the Second World War, with clandestine work being critical in pushing the U.S. to join the fight against Adolf Hitler’s Germany and help secure victory for the Allies.

Working with hundreds of spies based secretly on the 36th floor of New York’s Rockefeller Center and with the codename ‘Crusader’, he helped take on a Nazi spy ring plotting sabotage and destructionon on American soil.

His actions and ingenious ploys have gone down in history among intelligence circles, laid the foundations for the birth of the CIA, and even inspired James Bond.

Ernest Cuneo, America’s first spy of the Second World War, speaks with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Italian-American lawyer was part of FDR’s ‘brain trust’ and worked with Winston Churchill’s agents in the early 1940s

After two seasons with the NFL franchises the Orange Tornadoes and the Brooklyn Dodgers – where he was paid between $50 and $75 a game – Cuneo turned to politics 

His friend and British Secret Service agent Ian Fleming, the author of the spy novels, credited part of the plots of Thunderball and Goldfinger to Cuneo and even dedicated a character to him in Casino Royale: Ernest Curio.

Fleming called Cuneo his ‘muse.’ They became close friends while sharing stories of their work as spies.

The two would drink together at some of New York’s celebrated nightlife hotspots – such as the 21 Club and the Stork Club – often in the company of women. 

Cuneo also counted author Roald Dahl and playwright Noel Coward as his acquaintances, when they were spying for Britain.

His influence on American foreign policy was as big as his stature, and he would go on to become a willing source for the CIA by gaining the trust of the country’s most powerful people.

There is even evidence to suggest he received leaked documents from the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

His extraordinary journey from growing up an immigrant in the New Jersey suburbs to working with the White House and the highest echelons of espionage is detailed in full in Thomas Maier’s new biography, The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II.

Because of legislation that kept intelligence work secret and working under an honor code between spies to not discuss their actions, most of his accomplishments weren’t known until he died. The multihyphenate was buried at Arlington Cemetery in 1988 with full military honors.

Maier describes him as one of the first members of the ‘Deep State’ who had his fingers at every level of American Power.

With the war already killing millions across Europe in the early 1940s, and the United States grappling over whether to get involved, Cuneo was crucial in secretly turning the tide of public opinion.

Ian Fleming (pictured right with Ivar Bryce) credited part of the plots of Thunderball and Goldfinger to Cuneo and even dedicated a character to him in Casino Royale: Ernest Curio

Americans were deeply skeptical of sending their loved ones overseas to fight and die in a conflict thousands of miles from home, with the carnage of the First World War still fresh in their minds.

For many at the time, sending battleships and weapons to Britain was the furthest involvement they would tolerate.

But behind the scenes, Hitler had launched an unprecedented infiltration campaign in the U.S. with undercover agents trying to steal military secrets and spread the message that the Americans should keep their troops at home.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) faced relentless pressure from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to join the conflict, hoping to avoid Europe’s collapse.

When Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he knew how important it was to get the U.S. involved in the war. He sent Canadian businessman William Stephenson to New York to accelerate British intelligence efforts.

Cuneo became the go-to man between Stephenson and the British, the J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI, and the OSS (the forerunner of today’s CIA).

He was able to move adeptly between the bruising egos of Washington politics and the New York media, Maier writes in his biography.

The athlete became both a British intelligence asset and a White House confidante.

Born in Carlstadt, New Jersey, in 1905, he graduated from East Rutherford High School before studying law and playing football at Penn State University.

Then he went to Columbia, where he earned his reputation as a formidable, jack-of-all-trades lineman and was given All-American honors.

To earn money for school, he wrote for the New York Daily News – subsequently building a journalism pedigree that would later help his career.

After two seasons with the NFL franchises the Orange Tornadoes and the Brooklyn Dodgers – he was paid between $50 and $75 a game – Cuneo turned to politics.

Cuneo’s clandestine work was critical in pushing America to join the fight against Adolf Hitler’s Germany and help secure victory for the Allies

During his time working with Rockefeller Center, Cuneo also met Margaret Watson (pictured with her left), a Canadian staffer who was one of Churchill and Stephenson’s secret agents. They ended up married with two children

His extraordinary journey from growing up an immigrant in the New Jersey suburbs to the White House and the highest echelons of espionage is detailed in full in Thomas Maier’s new biography The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II

New York Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia hired him as an aide and behind-the-scenes fixer. In 1936 he began work for the Democratic National Committee as associate general counsel.

In 1938, he hatched a plot to help FDR run for an unprecedented third term in the White House in the 1940 general election.

Grateful for Cuneo’s work, FDR invited him to sit in the president’s box at the inaugural parade.

Though Cuneo declined, a relationship that would shape history had already formed. 

In 1940, the president gave Cuneo a secret task to prepare the country for war with a stealth media campaign.

At the same time, the British had tapped the former footballer for an unprecedented undercover operation in the U.S.

As part of the operation, a ‘disposal squad’ would get rid of those collaborating with the Nazis, and propaganda would be fed to American journalists who feared Hitler and were sympathetic to the British cause.

Cuneo believed Churchill’s mission was a life and death struggle, and vital to saving Western civilization.

Agents working with Stephenson, the mastermind of the British Security Coordination (BSC), would feed him evidence that German officers had infiltrated American life.

Stephenson, who was slowly reestablishing ties with the U.S. through FBI Director Hoover, set up a nerve center in Rockefeller Center under the cover of a British Passport Control office.

Cuneo then passed this information to the White House and would share it with his journalist friends, many of whom he would party with at bars and clubs across Manhattan.

He befriended the biggest media personalities in the U.S. to plant information in the pages of their newspapers or on their radio shows.

Walter Winchell, a columnist and broadcaster with one of the biggest audiences at the time, was one of his closest confidantes.

Officially, Winchell paid Cuneo an annual salary of $10,000 for legal services.

Meanwhile Cuneo was feeding him inside information from the highest levels of government and was ghostwriting some of his articles.

The information he supplied would end up in front of the 50 million Americans who read his newspapers and the 20 million who would tune into his Sunday night radio broadcasts.

Winchell would use his platform to blast isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, and antisemites. In his newspaper columns, he called them ‘Americans most Americans can do without.’

When Cuneo’s undercover work began, Americans were deeply skeptical about joining the war. But fears over the ‘Fifth Column’ – the presence of Nazi spies in the U.S. – started to spread 

During his time working with Rockefeller Center, Cuneo also met Margaret Watson, a Canadian working for British intelligence and acting as a secret agent for Churchill and Stephenson.

She had a photographic memory that was perfect for spying, and had a brush with death when she was almost smothered by a Nazi assassin in her dorm.

Cuneo, who divorced his first wife, struck up an affair with Watson – they married and had two children.

By 1941, Cuneo realized that British intelligence and their Nazi enemies, the Abwehr, were far better at spreading disinformation than the Americans were at detecting and stopping it.

Despite all the spycraft devices available – like pens containing knives, and explosives made to look like tropical fruit – he knew the most powerful was propaganda.

He watched as the BSC created an entirely fake map of Nazi plans to occupy South America, all in an effort to persuade the U.S. to enter the war.

The map fell into American hands – as British spooks intended – and was eventually shown to Roosevelt at the White House.

For FDR, it was proof of Hitler’s true intent and he then believed any hope of peace with Germany was gone.

The U.S. entered the war in December 1941 after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor – within a week, they declared war on the Axis powers.

Cuneo was stunned, as he hadn’t believed the U.S. would ever enter the war.

He thought Hitler was misguided in getting into a fight with an industrial giant like the U.S. that would soon focus nation-wide factory production on manufacturing weapons.

‘Hitler is crazy as fox, not crazy,’ he told columnist Drew Pearson. ‘Czechoslovakia he can overrun but Detroit he can’t,’ referring to the automobile center of the U.S.

After the war, Cuneo returned to journalism and bought the news service Newspaper Alliance in the mid-1950s.

In 1963, his ability to influence public opinion was still in tact.

According to Maier, former CIA Director Allen Dulles secretly offered details about its deliberations to Cuneo, who was preparing a freelance story about the Warren Commission.

The two worked together as spies for the Office of Strategic Services during the war, and Cuneo had named Dulles as a ‘principal source of information’ during his time reporting out the piece, which was never published.

In a memo dated June 22, 1964, Hoover said he learned from a federal judge that ‘Cuneo has interviewed a number of people, including as he had mentioned, Dulles, and he has substantial knowledge of what is going to be in the [Warren] report.’

During that time period, Warren Commission members like Dulles were privy to many confidential documents and were expected to keep quiet during their highly sensitive investigation of Kennedy’s death.

The FBI documents cited in Maier’s book – part of thousands already released since the 1990s about JFK’s assassination – provide the only known evidence of a ‘leak’ by a Warren Commission member to a person outside the government.

Still, Cuneo couldn’t gain further confirmation from the FBI, and he never wrote his behind-the-scenes article that likely would have revealed more about the Kennedy killing. 

Donald Trump’s administration released a huge batch of the remaining files in March 2025.