William Stephenson
Sir William Samuel Stephenson was a Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman and spymaster who served as the senior representative of the British Security Coordination for the Western Allies during World War II. He is best known by his wartime intelligence code name, Intrepid. Many people consider him to be one of the real-life inspirations for James Bond. Ian Fleming himself once wrote, "James Bond is a highly romanticised version of a true spy. The real thing is... William Stephenson."
As head of the BSC, Stephenson handed British scientific secrets over to Franklin D. Roosevelt and relayed American secrets back to Winston Churchill. In addition, Stephenson has been credited with changing American public opinion from an isolationist stance to a supportive tendency regarding the United States' entry into World War II.
Early life
Stephenson was born William Samuel Clouston Stanger on 23 January 1897, in Point Douglas, Winnipeg, Manitoba. His mother was Icelandic, and his father was Scottish from the Orkney Islands. Water Street in Winnipeg was renamed in his honour to William Stephenson Way.He left school at a young age and worked as a telegrapher. In January 1916, during World War I, he volunteered for service in the 101st Overseas Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force. He left for England on RMS Olympic on 29 June 1916, arriving on 6 July 1916. The 101st Battalion was broken up in England, and he was transferred to the 17th Reserve Battalion in East Sandling, Kent. On 17 July, he was transferred to the Canadian Engineer Training Depot. He was attached to the Sub Staff, Canadian Training Depot Headquarters, in Shorncliffe, and was promoted to Sergeant in May 1917. In June 1917 he was "on command" to the Cadet Wing of the Royal Flying Corps at Denham Barracks, Buckinghamshire.
On 15 August 1917, Stephenson was officially struck off the strength of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and granted a commission in Britain's Royal Flying Corps. Posted to 73 Squadron on 9 February 1918, he flew the Sopwith Camel biplane fighter and scored 12 victories to become a flying ace before he was shot down and crashed his plane behind enemy lines on 28 July 1918. During the incident Stephenson was injured by fire from a German ace pilot, Justus Grassmann, by friendly fire, or by both. In any event, he was subsequently captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner of war until allegedly escaping in October 1918. His Royal Air Force Service file indicates that he was repatriated from the Holzminden prisoner-of-war camp on 9 December 1918.
By the end of World War I, Stephenson had achieved the rank of Captain and earned the Military Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross. His medal citations perhaps foreshadow his later achievements, and read:
Interwar period
After World War I, Stephenson returned to Manitoba and with a friend, Wilf Russell, started a hardware business, inspired largely by a can opener that Stephenson had taken from his POW camp. The business was unsuccessful, and he left Canada for England. In England, Stephenson soon became wealthy, with business contacts in many countries. In 1924, he married American tobacco heiress Mary French Simmons, of Springfield, Tennessee. That same year, Stephenson and George William Walton patented a system for transmitting photographic images via wireless that produced £100,000 a year in royalties for the 18-year run of the patent. In addition to his patent royalties, Stephenson swiftly diversified into several lucrative industries: radio manufacturing ; aircraft manufacturing ; Pressed Steel Company that manufactured car bodies for the British motor industry; construction and cement, as well as Shepperton Studios and Earls Court. Stephenson had a broad base of industrial contacts in Europe, Britain and North America, as well as a large group of contacts in the international film industry. Shepperton Studios were the largest film studios in the world outside of Hollywood.As early as April 1936, Stephenson was voluntarily providing confidential information to British MP Winston Churchill about how Adolf Hitler's Nazi government was building up its armed forces and hiding military expenditures of £800,000,000. This was a clear violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and showed the growing Nazi threat to European and international security. Churchill used Stephenson's information in Parliament to warn against the appeasement policies of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
World War II
After World War II began now-Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Stephenson to the United States on 21 June 1940, to covertly establish and run British Security Coordination in New York City, over a year before U.S. entry into the war.His deputy at BSC was the Australian-born MI6 intelligence officer Dick Ellis, who has been credited with writing the blueprint for William Donovan's Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services. Ellis wrote an Historical Note for William Stevenson's 1976 biography of Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid.
BSC was registered by the State Department as a foreign entity. It operated out of Room 3603 at Rockefeller Center and was officially known as the British Passport Control Office from which it had expanded. BSC acted as the administrative headquarters more than the operational one for the Secret Intelligence Service and the Special Operations Executive and was a channel for communications and liaison between US and British security and intelligence organisations.
Stephenson's initial directives for BSC were to
- investigate enemy activities;
- institute security measures against sabotage to British property; and
- organize American public opinion in favour of aid to Britain.
Stephenson was soon a close adviser to Roosevelt, and suggested that he put Stephenson's good friend William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan in charge of all U.S. intelligence services. Donovan founded the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which in 1947 would become the Central Intelligence Agency. As senior representative of British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere, Stephenson was one of the few persons in the hemisphere who were authorized to view raw Ultra transcripts of German Enigma ciphers that had been decrypted at Britain's Bletchley Park facility. He was trusted by Churchill to decide what Ultra information to pass along to various branches of the U.S. and Canadian governments.
While it was still neutral, agreement was made for all trans-Atlantic mails from the U.S. to be routed through the British colony of Bermuda, 640 miles off the North Carolina coast. Airmails carried by both British and American aircraft were landed at RAF Darrell's Island and delivered to 1,200 censors of British Imperial Censorship, part of BSC, working in the Princess Hotel. All mail, radio and telegraphic traffic bound for Europe, the U.S. and the Far East were intercepted and analyzed by 1,200 censors, of British Imperial Censorship, part of British Security Coordination, before being routed to their destination with no indication that they had been read.
With BSC working closely with the FBI, the censors were responsible for the discovery and arrest of a number of Axis spies operating in the US, including the Joe K ring.
After the war, Stephenson lived at the Princess Hotel for a time before buying his own home in Bermuda.
Under Stephenson, BSC directly influenced U.S. media, and media in other hemisphere countries, toward pro-British and anti-Axis views. Once the U.S. had entered the war in December 1941, BSC went on to train U.S. propagandists from the United States Office of War Information in Canada. BSC covert intelligence and propaganda efforts directly affected wartime developments in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico, the Central American countries, Bermuda, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Stephenson worked without salary.
He hired hundreds of people, mostly Canadian women, to staff his organization and covered much of the expense out of his own pocket. His employees included secretive communications genius Benjamin deForest "Pat" Bayly and future advertising wizard David Ogilvy. Stephenson employed Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, codenamed CYNTHIA, to seduce Vichy French officials into giving up Enigma ciphers and secrets from their Washington embassy. At the height of the war Bayly, a University of Toronto professor from Moose Jaw, created the Rockex, the fast secure communications system that would eventually be relied on by all the Allies.
Not least of Stephenson's contributions to the war effort was the setting up by BSC of Camp X, the unofficial name of the secret Special Training School No. 103, a Second World War paramilitary installation for training covert agents in the methods required for success in clandestine operations. Located in Whitby, Ontario, this was the first such training school in North America. Estimates vary, but between 500 and 2,000 British, Canadian and American covert operators were trained there from 1941 to 1945.
Reports indicate that Camp X graduates worked as "secret agents, security personnel, intelligence officers, or psychological warfare experts, serving in clandestine operations. Many were captured, tortured, and executed; survivors received no individual recognition for their efforts." Camp X graduates operated in Europe as well as in Africa, Australia, India and the Pacific. They may have included Ian Fleming, future author of the James Bond books. It has been said that the fictional Goldfinger's raid on Fort Knox was inspired by a Stephenson plan to steal $2,883,000,000 in Vichy French gold reserves from the French Caribbean colony of Martinique.
BSC purchased a ten-kilowatt transmitter from Philadelphia radio station WCAU and installed it at Camp X. By mid-1944, Hydra was transmitting 30,000 and receiving 9,000 message groups daily – much of the secret Allied intelligence traffic across the Atlantic.