We all lie. But some of us are better at it than others. Then there are people who are so good at lying that they are paid to change the minds of millions, using techniques few of us will ever understand.

It is often said that we live in an age of fake news, but this has been going on for years, and so have attempts to describe, analyse and anticipate its impact on our political lives. Books about fake news have an unsettling and dystopian undertone, and they force us to question the headlines. At the same time, the scale of the subject and the very idea of unseen forces trying to manipulate our minds gives many of these books the compulsive energy of a cold-war thriller.

My book Our Man in New York is an account of the largest influence campaign ever run by a foreign nation inside the US, and arguably the most significant use of fake news in American history. But it had nothing to do with Donald Trump or Moscow. This campaign was run by the British out of a vast office inside the Rockefeller Center in New York in the months leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The British operation had two objectives: to swing American public opinion towards the war, and to provoke Hitler into declaring war on the US.

As recently declassified files show, often in vivid detail, undercover British agents infiltrated US pressure groups, subverted opinion polls, hacked correspondence, tapped telephone lines and repeatedly fed lies, exaggerations and rumours to the news cycle. In the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor, we now know that the White House, the senior MI6 officer in the US, and the head of the precursor of the CIA also worked together to confect misleading news.

American opinion did indeed swing, which allowed Roosevelt to concentrate on Germany before Japan, and Hitler declared war on the US, despite having no obligation to do so (and against the wishes of his senior military officers).

Here are 10 books to shed some light into such crepuscular operations.

1. Propaganda by Edward Bernays (1928)

At the heart of this book are two radical ideas: that there’s an “invisible government” manipulating the way millions of Americans think, and that this might not be such a bad thing. Bernays urged his readers to think of propaganda in the broadest terms, including advertisements and sermons alongside political messaging. This was also the first book to explore a more Freudian approach to fake news (Freud was Bernays’s uncle twice over), and the power of focusing less on what we say we want and more on our hidden fears and desires.

2. Propaganda in the Next War by Sidney Rogerson (1938)

At times this reads like a how-to guide in the dark arts of covert propaganda. “Never tell a lie,” Rogerson begins, “if you can possibly help it”. On publication, anti-war US politicians seized on this book as proof that perfidious Albion was trying to drag the country into another war. One of them, Senator Gerald Nye, excoriated this book in the Senate. Few realised that Nye was then working on a Nazi influence campaign, or that German propagandists would distribute copies of the senator’s speech to hundreds of thousands of Americans, all at US taxpayers’ expense.

3. Broadcast Hysteria by A Brad Schwartz (2015)

A captivating look at the best known hoax of the 20th century: Orson Welles’s 1938 radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds. Schwartz skewers the myths surrounding this broadcast. It turns out there was little panic about an alien invasion, but in the months that followed there was real panic surrounding radio’s capacity for subversion and fakery. Welles’s broadcast ended the “golden age of radio”, leaving millions with a new – and necessary – scepticism towards what they heard on the airwaves.

4. British Security Coordination by Roald Dahl, Gilbert Highet et al (1998)

Never intended to be published, this is a flawed but fascinating book. It is a sanctioned insiders’ account of the British influence campaign in the US, and was only meant to be read by a handful of civil servants with the right security clearance. It is full of revelations, and at the same time littered with mistakes and exaggerations. A book about disinformation that is riddled with, well, disinformation.

Based on a true fake news story … Hayley Atwell and Lucas Romer in the 2012 TV adaptation of Restless. Photograph: Ilse Kitshoff/BBC/Endor Productions

5. Restless by William Boyd (2006)

Our narrator, Ruth, learns that her mother is not everything she seems. Via a stream of flashbacks we learn about her time working for “British Security Coordination”, the cover name used for the real British influence campaign in 1941. This is not so much a spy thriller as a novel about spies, that is thrilling as well as taut, emotionally rich, brilliantly researched and ultimately a powerful examination of the burden of espionage.

6. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

In the days after Donald Trump was sworn in as US president, a member of his team described Trump’s inauguration as better attended than any other in history, later defending this claim as an “alternative fact”. In the following days, sales of Orwell’s dystopia shot up by almost 10,000%. This book remains an iconic and frequently terrifying vision of a world in which truth is relative and language is a political weapon.

7. Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch (2009)

As we learn more about its manipulation, we become more sceptical of the news. Aaronovitch’s analysis of conspiracy theories is provocative, compelling and thoughtful. He is particularly good about conveying our underlying need to latch on to a narrative – often any will do – when confronted with an event that appears to make little sense.

8. Cyberwar by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018)

Although we can never measure with precision the impact of the Russian influence campaign on the 2016 US presidential election, this detailed study by renowned political communication academic Jamieson is easily the best analysis we have. She argues persuasively that given the tiny margins in the poll results, the Russian influence campaign probably delivered the presidency to Trump.

9. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

This novel is the outlier on the list, in that it’s not obviously about fake news. Most people will tell you it’s an intensely personal and often autobiographical account of Roth’s childhood and the lived experience of antisemitism. At the same time, it is an alternative history of America in which a racist media personality – Charles Lindbergh in 1940 – becomes US president and the country becomes steadily more divided and xenophobic. This becomes possible largely thanks to mendacious use of the media.

10. Weaponized Lies by Daniel Levitin (2016)

Although every other book on this list focuses on the use and impact of fake news, this one is a call to resistance. It is a primer by a respected cognitive psychologist on how to spot lies and exaggerations in the media. Although parts of the book have the nannying tone of a self-help book, it is packed with fascinating material on the misuse of statistics and language.

• Our Man in New York: The British Plot to Bring America into the Second World War by Henry Hemming is published by Quercus. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

