Essential secrecy was thus preserved for a further ten years. In 1972, the author of this book, William Stevenson, after many and long discussions with Intrepid, suggested to me that more was to be gained than lost by full disclosure. I could not have agreed more. The story of BSC was that of a great Anglo-American enterprise that began when President Roosevelt and his like-minded colleagues saved the British Isles from Nazi occupation despite the United States then being technically at peace. In 1972, Moscow, through its many secret agencies, was again mounting a formidable campaign in the United States with the purpose of isolating this single great power that might again save the democracies from their own follies. It was time, I felt, to remind ourselves that much as we may deplore the use of secrecy, it was secrecy that saved us only a generation ago. Now, the Central Intelligence Agency had become the chief target of those who would summarily disarm us and who would, citing real or alleged abuses by the agency, “throw the baby out with the bath water” and rob us of the essential means of preventive defense secured at such cost during the Second World War.
As one of BSC’s historians, I readily agreed to place my own papers at the author’s disposal. Among these were the organizational tables that led to the birth of General William Donovan’s OSS. Intrepid was the midwife of OSS, and the reader can see for himself how it all began in a fierce struggle to save individual freedom.
I can now disclose that the reason for the break in the silence about BSC in 1962 was the escape to the Soviet Union of Kim Philby, the brilliant Communist agent who had infiltrated the British secret service; who, by the end of the Second World War, was directing the anti-Communist section; and who was the leading contender to become the chief of that fabled service. We knew that Philby took with him the knowledge of BSC’s existence, but we also knew that he was not aware of the full and far-reaching purpose of Intrepid’s organization. Thus just enough of the truth was revealed for publication to blunt the effect of any disclosures that Philby or his supporters might reveal. But ten years later, in 1972, we knew also that the Russians had learned rather more and might use this information to bludgeon our friends, to distort history, and to hurt United States and Canadian relations with Britain. Full disclosure at last was the answer to this threat and to the demands of history. Hence this book.
Charles Howard Ellis
Eastbourne, Sussex
Colonel C. H. (“Dick”) Ellis, CMG, CBE, OBE, U.S. Legion of Merit, served as a British secret agent in Egypt, India, Persia, Russia, Afghanistan, and held British consular posts in Turkey, the Balkans, Germany, and Asia between the wars. He convinced Churchill at the end of World War II to pay a veiled but public tribute to INTREPID’S BSC teams in these words: “We may feel sure that nothing of which we have any knowledge or record has ever been done by mortal men which surpasses the splendour and daring of their feats of arms.” President Harry Truman, making Ellis an officer of the Legion of Merit, wrote: “He gave unreservedly of his talent and wealth of information toward the development of certain of our intelligence organizations and methods. His enthusiastic interest, superior foresight and diplomacy were responsible in large measure for the success of highly important operations.”
SIGNIFICANT DATES
Winston Churchill appointed First Lord of the Admiralty
1911: October 25
Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy
1913: March 17
William Stephenson joins Royal Canadian Engineers after outbreak of World War I
1914: August 4
William Donovan sent by the Rockefeller Foundation’s American War Relief Commission to investigate conditions in war-torn Europe
1916: March
First meeting of Stephenson and Donovan in England
April/May
Stephenson in France as fighter pilot with No. 73 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps
September
United States enters World War I
1917: April 6
Germany collapses; Churchill’s “Thirty-Year Armistice” begins
1918: November 11
Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany
1933: January 30
Stephenson witnesses Nazi “burning of the books”
May 20
Churchill is jeered when he warns of Germany’s re-arming
August
Hitler begins organized persecution of Jews
1934: April 1
Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist forces invade Abyssinia
1935: October 2
Germany occupies the Rhineland
1936: March 7
Rome-Berlin Axis established
October 25
Stephenson obtains summary of Hitler’s secret briefing of German high command for conquest of Europe and control of British Empire
1937: November
Germany marches into Austria
1938: March 11
Stephenson obtains plans for Hitler’s OPERATION GREEN for the take-over of Czechoslovakia
April
Neville Chamberlain signs Munich agreement declaring “peace in our time” and “peace with honor”
September 30
German troops enter Czech Sudetenland
October 1
Germans enter Prague
1939: March 15
Roosevelt’s appeal to Hitler for peace is rejected Colin Gubbins, future chief of Baker Street Irregulars, sent to Poland on British intelligence mission
April
Italy invades Albania
April 7
Enigma, Nazi coding machine, smuggled out of Warsaw
August 22
Germany and Russia sign pact with secret clause for the division of Poland
August 23
Britain signs Mutual Assistance Treaty with Poland
August 25
Germany invades Poland
September 1
Britain and France declare war on Germany
September 3
Chamberlain government appoints Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty
September 3
Roosevelt (POTUS) suggests to Churchill (Naval Person) a confidential exchange of information
September 15
Stephenson identifies Nork Hydro as source of heavy water for German atomic experiments
October
Stephenson leaves for STRIKE OX diversion
November
Russia invades Finland
November 30
Russia consolidates her half of Poland
November
Churchill recommends interruption of German-bound supplies from Norway and Sweden by means “neither diplomatic nor military”
November 30
Stephenson goes to Finland for last-ditch effort to repel Russian invasion
December
Stephenson travels to Norwegian heavy-water plant in wake of German scientists
January/February
Stephenson informs Churchill of top-secret scientific report that an atomic bomb can be constructed
March
Stephenson and Roosevelt discuss plan of co-operation between FBI and British secret intelligence
April
Germany invades Denmark and Norway
April 9
Germany invades Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and, finally, France
May 10–14
Churchill forms coalition government
May 10
Churchill delivers his first speech as Prime Minister, offers nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”
May 13
Churchill appeals to Roosevelt for loan of destroyers
May 15
British mobilize for Dunkirk evacuation on basis of ULTRA intercepts
May 15
Dunkirk evacuation
May 26–June 4
Germans enter Paris; Italy declares war on France and Britain
June 10–14
Churchill, on emer
gency journey to France, offers federal union in desperate bid to keep French fighting
June 16
Stephenson (INTREPID) goes to New York to set up British Security Coordination
June
Churchill orders bombardment of French fleet at Oran, in North Africa
July 3
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy in London advises Roosevelt against “holding the bag in a war in which the Allies expect to be beaten”
July 4
Donovan flies to London as Roosevelt’s personal representative to see British secret warfare preparations
July 14
Start of air attacks foreshadowing Battle of Britain
July 14
Donovan learns of Nazi invasion plan, OPERATION SEALION
July
Battle of Britain begins
August 10
Donovan returns to Washington with concept for a U.S. intelligence agency
September 15
Germany, Italy, Japan form “Axis”
September 27
Hitler postpones SEALION
October 12
Roosevelt elected President for third term
November 5
British naval carrier planes inflict heavy losses on Italian fleet at Taranto
November 11–12
Coventry terror-bombed
November 14–15
Donovan returns to Britain; stops at Bermuda to study special aspects of British anti-Nazi operations
December
Stephenson, Donovan, and Churchill discuss possibility of diverting Hitler in East Europe on basis of ULTRA intercepts
1941: January
U.S. and Britain plan global strategy in ABC-1
January/February
Donovan tours Balkans aware that Hitler seeks to secure flanks before attacking Russia
February/March
Yugoslav military Putsch follows Donovan’s departure
March 17
Germany invades Yugoslavia
April 6
Operations against German battleship Bismarck
May 20–27
Germans invade Russia
June 22
Roosevelt appoints Donovan chief of first centralized intelligence agency with title of Coordinator of Information
July 11
Japanese land in French Indochina
July 28
Churchill and Roosevelt meet on H.M.S. Prince of Wales and sign Atlantic Charter
August 10–11
Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and Singapore
December 7
Hitler issues Nacht und Nebel decree for German-occupied countries
December 7
Germany declares war on United States
December 11
Churchill arrives in Washington on first wartime visit
December 22
Stephenson obtains details of Hitler/Heydrich conference on “Final Solution of Jewish Question”
1942: February
Reinhard Heydrich assassinated
May 27
Donovan’s agency is renamed Office of Strategic Services
June 13
Churchill flies to Washington to discuss Russian demands for European invasion and the Anglo-American TORCH invasion of North Africa
June 17
Dwight Eisenhower appointed commander-in-chief, Europe
June 25
Dieppe raid (JUBILEE) probes Fortress Europe
August 19
Allies land in North Africa (TORCH)
November 8
Operations begun for destruction of German heavy-water sources for atomic research
1943: February
Atomic scientist Niels Bohr is flown to Britain to join U.S.-British atomic-bomb program
October 7
Allies land in Normandy
1944: June 6
Rockets hit London
June/September
Roosevelt dies
1945: April 12
Hitler commits suicide
April 30
Germany surrenders unconditionally
May 8
Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima
August 6
Japan surrenders
August 14
INTREPID and BSC depart headquarters in New York
August/December
President Harry Truman disbands OSS
September 20
PART
I
IN TIME OF PEACE
“A wise man in time of peace prepares for war.”
—Horace, Satires
1
A brash young man named Winston Churchill was on the North American lecture circuit at the turn of the century, retelling the story of guerrillas in South Africa and his own escape from one of their “camps of concentration.” His audiences were disappointingly small. Nobody could have foreseen that Churchill was describing some of the grimmer features of future conflict: unconventional warfare, political terrorism, and concentration camps.
In January 1901 he left the United States for Canada. On the twenty-second he reached Winnipeg, and found it draped in black. Queen Victoria was dead. The British Empire had crossed a watershed. Churchill wrote home to his American mother in England that “this city far away among the snows . . . began to hang its head.”
A five-year-old boy in the crowds mourning the death of the distant monarch was Billy Stephenson. His father had been killed in South Africa, and the news had reached him a few days earlier, on his birthday. Shivering on the snow-banked sidewalks on the day of Churchill’s arrival in Winnipeg, he thought his dead father must have been a great hero to deserve such attention.
Stephenson’s boyhood could not have been more different from that of the two partners he would have at a later critical moment in history: Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had more in common with his future comrade in secret warfare William J. Donovan, then living on the United States side of the frontier.
Stephenson was self-reliant early in life. He was three years old when his father went to fight in Africa with the Manitoba Transvaal Contingent. The boy grew up on the prairies of western Canada, where the long and bitter winters shaped and polished the character of the settlers. His own family had pioneer blood that went back for generations.
Great-grandpa Donald had migrated from Aberdeen in Scotland way back in 1780. He married another Scot, Jean Campbell. They had a son, William Victor, who married Christine Breckman. Her forebears had come from Norway. Billy was born in 1896, on January 11, the coldest day in recorded history in that bleak part of the American continent.
He devoured books. One of his earlier memories was reading “What hath God wrought!”—the words signaled in 1844 by Samuel F. B. Morse, who developed the first successful telegraph in the United States and the most commonly used telegraphic code. Billy’s middle name was Samuel in honor of the great Morse. Morse influenced not only Billy Stephenson, but also, in a manner the youth could not imagine, the man he would become.
The boy grew up in Point Douglas, near Winnipeg, dividing his time between Argyle High School and the lumber mill started by his father.
“He was restless and inquisitive,” recalled an Argyle teacher, Jean Moffatt. “A bookworm, we always thought, except he loved boxing. A wee fellow, but a real one for a fight. Of course, y’see, he was the man o’ the house from the time he was a toddler.”
In his early teens, Stephenson experimented with electricity, steam engines, kites, and crude airplanes. He rigged his own Morse telegraph, a transmitter and receiver, and tapped out messages to ships on the Great Lakes. He knew the call signs of all the stations within reach and he worked out his own code, an improvement on the Secret Vocabulary Adapted For Use To Morse’s Electromagnetic Telegraph, published by Morse’s legal representative, Francis O. J. Smith, for the benefit of commercial users of the telegraph system in the mid-nineteenth century. Later, when asked about his education, he wo
uld look blank. “I got it like everyone else. From books.”
He went straight from high school into World War I. His final school report stated: “High powers of concentration when his interest is aroused. Strong sense of duty. Good sport. Will be greatly missed.”
The British decision to go to war against Germany in 1914 brought volunteers from the United States and Canada, attracted often by the promise of adventure. Stephenson was sent straight to the trenches with the Royal Canadian Engineers. Before his nineteenth birthday, he was commissioned in the field. Men fell in such numbers that he was advanced to captain within the year. He suffered the trauma of a poison-gas attack and saw men die in convulsion or lose sight and mind. For twenty months he knew the misery of the foot soldier. Then, crippled in another gas attack, he was sent back to England as “disabled for life.”
Another strand of the far-distant future then appeared. In the third summer of the war, William Donovan was completing a survey of the conflict for the Rockefeller-sponsored American War Relief Commission in the hope of limiting the carnage. Donovan was thirty-three, a successful New York lawyer, and a shrewd investigator. He was appalled by what he found. Great armies embraced and heaved and pulled without shifting ground, locked in lingering death.
“One of the ‘veterans’ from this nightmare was this twenty-year-old Canadian,” Donovan said later in notes for a biographer.* “I felt an old man, wickedly well-fed, against this skinny kid. But when he started to talk, I paid attention. I had asked a couple of routine questions. His answers were concise and perceptive. At our first meeting, in 1916, we discovered a shared background that overcame the gulf between those already fighting the war and us Americans, still out of it. I’d been a member of Canadian rowing teams near my home in Buffalo. Each week at the Crystal Rowing Club in Ontario, I’d argued with Canadians about the American Republic’s rejection of monarchy and Canada’s device for keeping a British king without taking orders from London.
“Stephenson understood our American style that was taken, in England in the midst of a bloodbath, for brash vulgarity. And I had some understanding of why the English who survived the front lines were close-mouthed. Stephenson was willing to translate the horror into facts and figures for me.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 2