Please click to Digg our site.in the President Adlai Stevenson asked Congress to revoke the honourary US citizenship of the recently disgraced former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

This totally unexpected and shocking outcome was caused by a chance discovery made in January by the CIA operative Miles Copeland. Based in Beirut, he had been investigating the British double agent Kim Philby. Transcripts dating from early 1945 were discovered which revealed that the British Government had ordered the assassination of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

These mispoken words were the equivalent of Henry VIII's unconsidered comment of "off with his head" that had doomed Thomas More. Apart from this soliloquy, the decision to eliminate Roosevelt was taken with Churchill's blessing, but in all probability, without his explicit approval as is the way of such things. As an amateur historian, with an American mother, Churchill might well have reflected upon the unexposed conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln. A well known actor called John Wilkes Booth had shot the President, jumped onto the stage where he had made his getaway from Washington on horseback (presumably, getting himself lost amongst the rebel soldiers flowing home after Lee's surrender).

But history would not repeat itself on this occasion. Because in the transcripts discovered by Copeland, Kim Philby had falsified intelligence reports that Roosevelt planned to use the strength of the dollar to hammer the pound sterling after the war. Already fearing that Roosevelt would use the United Nations to dismante European colonial empires, this new information forced the British Government's hand. Of course there was a typically British cover-up later on when it was discovered that not only was this information false, but worse Truman was "tight-fistedly" planning to reduce Britain's post-war aid. The result was counter-productive: a "deadly hiatus" between the two Presidencies, which could only profit the Soviet Union, and personally satisfy the traitorous intentions of Kim Philby.