A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The basic work was done by Admiralty experts in London. The Watch there was kept twenty-four hours a day, every day, by specialists sitting in a horseshoe around the Watch Keeper. The British Navy also kept its own experts at Bermuda and Bletchley, because it was felt that significant items in enemy traffic might escape the notice of landlubbers. Significant naval material was selected and the most important went straight to London.

  In Bermuda, a Special Liaison Unit, trained at Bletchley, rephrased information so that it bore no resemblance to the original signals. The SLU leader was the only man empowered to convey this distilled information to British or American service units. Once it had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of Admiral King that these rephrased intelligence messages were obtained directly from German headquarters, it became possible to get fast U.S. Navy action, in close harmony with British warships.

  One of the world’s great secret-ink experts, Dr. Stanley W. Collins, of London, set up an operation in Bermuda’s hot and humid vaults, where the pace of work was such that English girls fainted from a combination of fatigue and heat. So discreetly were these arrangements handled that it was more than three decades before it was partly acknowledged: “Britain’s decision to intercept traffic from the United States to Europe brought the first big change here,” wrote Bermuda’s official historian and editor of the Royal Gazette, W. S. Zuill, in 1973. “Ships were herded into port. Aircraft waited while the mails were examined. Large numbers of experts and linguists moved into the Princess and Bermudiana hotels and their work exposed German spies already ‘in place’ in the United States. Art treasures stolen by the Nazis in France and shipped through neutral ports to be sold in New York for Hitler’s war machine were confiscated. In one case, the American Export Lines’ ship Excalibur carried valuable paintings in a sealed strongroom. When the captain refused to open it, the British burned it open like safecrackers, took the paintings and stored them in the Bank of Bermuda vaults until they could be returned to the Paris owner who got all 270 of these Impressionist works back intact, to his own considerable astonishment.”

  The commercial transatlantic airline route was Pan American’s service of Boeing 314 flying boats, whose cargoes and passengers were discreetly screened while the planes refueled on the island. Sometimes a Clipper’s entire cargo had to be hastily examined while the crew were entertained in the yacht club. While “trappers” moved at high speed through the mail, one excuse followed another for delaying the flying boat.

  The techniques of prying open sealed envelopes without leaving a trace required practice. The most skillful trappers were women. And by some quirk in the law of averages, the girls who shone in this work had well-turned ankles. “It was fairly certain that a girl with unshapely legs would make a bad trapper and become a square peg in a round hole,” one BSC medical officer wrote in a solemn memo. “Nobody has discovered what part the leg plays. There is here the basis for some fundamental research.” The author was an athletic young doctor. BSC decided he was trying to create a new and rewarding department for himself. But would-be trappers continued to be baffled by requests to display their ankles.

  Some of the girls came from MI-5. Postings to Bermuda sounded romantic. They proved dull and demanding. The girls outnumbered the men, who were, in any case, mostly married, middle-aged, or buried in work. Among the more printable comments was this verse from The Virgin’s Lament:

  I’m just a girl at MI 5

  and heading for a virgin’s grave—

  My legs it was wot got me in—

  Still I wait for my bit of sin.

  Long ears, sharp eyes, and well-turned ankles were hardly a match for the enemy’s more subtle methods of communication. “Duff,” the microdot method of slipping information through the mail, involved photographically shrinking a typed page to the size of an ordinary typewritten punctuation mark. To recover the message, a 200-power microscope was required. The punctuation dots were scattered through a letter like raisins in the suet puddings called in the British Army “plum duff,” hence the nickname.

  The microdot was heralded by Hoover as “the enemy’s masterpiece of espionage.” Bermuda disclosed to the FBI the hypermicrophotographic dots and the method of their preparation by nonportable apparatus. The FBI, to protect British sources, gave the credit elsewhere. The Bermuda trappers could not hope to find microdots by random search. They needed to be kept informed of suspects whose letters should be inspected, of addresses that BSC and the FBI felt uneasy about, and of the categories of correspondence that seemed to be destined for German intelligence fronts. Information gained through Bermuda led to the unmasking of clandestine German activities in Latin America, where British agents could then produce even more knowledge for the compilers of dossiers in New York. These compilations by BSC scholars were the basis of research and analysis, which became vital to special intelligence operations.

  The procedure during U.S. neutrality was for Bermuda to pass to BSC in New York the essence of intercepted enemy intelligence messages, with additional details culled from the researchers’ files. Inquiries could be made among London and European intelligence stations for further information concerning the addressee. The result, whether a fat dossier or a single sheet of paper, was passed to the FBI, whose outstanding work was in investigation and analysis. The identification of handwriting and typing was made by scanning thousands upon thousands of documents in which a suspect’s script might pop up again, using composite cards displaying ten or more highly characteristic alphabetical letters originally found in the intercepted missive.

  An intensive analysis was made of the information derived from the letters of known agents. Here the FBI threw into the pot whatever material BSC could provide. For instance, if an agent was using secret ink, he would have had to write visibly some kind of a letter that could withstand routine examination by inquisitive eyes. It is difficult to compose an open letter that makes sense, appears innocent, and deals with small details of business or domestic life without occasionally revealing some pertinent fact about the author’s personal life. Where there is no secret ink, and the real message has to be buried in a seemingly innocent letter, the writer’s task is harder. The greater the number of messages intercepted in connection with a single investigation, the better chance the FBI had of discovering a clue.

  “Early cooperation in the field made it possible to keep pace with German improvements in technology,” the BSC Papers noted. “We were ready when Professor Zapp’s Cabinet appeared upon the scene! There really was a German professor of that name who simplified the process of microphotography.”

  This advance enabled German agents to send huge quantities of technical information by airmail. Trade and technical journals, economic reports and other printed matter, were smuggled over the border into Mexico, where they were microphotographed and sent to the European cover addresses in the form of dots. Even diagrams and chemical formulas traveled this way, twenty or more dots to an air letter. “Professor Zapp’s Cabinet” was a compact folding laboratory. Microphotography had previously involved two stages: making a postage-stamp photograph of the material, then photographing this “stamp” through a reversed microscope. The resultant negative was lifted out of the emulsion with a modified hypodermic needle and cemented into a letter with collodion. Zapp’s Cabinet mechanized an operation in which the microdots were photographically fixed but were not developed until received. The dots were consequently transparent negatives and could be stuck onto the gummed part of an envelope. The emulsion used in this process was an aniline dye instead of a silver compound, and an image could be resolved in very fine detail. Once the searchers became aware, they paid even closer attention to the mails.

  Bermuda was thus more than a backstop to BSC operations in New York. It played an aggressive role against enemy operations in the Americas when few took the threat of a Nazi fifth column seriously. A British field organization for counterespionage in the United States itself was precluded for many rea
sons. Employment of agents would have violated the McKellar Act. Better results were to be won by the close and informal liaison nourished by Stephenson. This was helped by the legitimate co-operation between the U.S. and Canadian peacekeeping agencies whereby covert co-operation on anti-Nazi intelligence was disguised as routine police work.

  It suited Hoover to let Bermuda continue as an offshore catchall. There his agents could participate in British intelligence operations without having to answer awkward questions from the State Department, jealously resisting FBI expansion into foreign fields. After Stephenson’s main base in Rockefeller Center grew to the point where it was difficult to disguise, Bermuda’s machinery changed. The advantages of transferring activities to Bermuda became apparent. Hoover was given FDR’s personal encouragement to collect secret intelligence concerning German subversion all through the Western Hemisphere. The President instructed him to prepare measures against any such operations at home if war should come. But Hoover was trapped between the President’s determination to prepare for war and Congress’s almost fanatic insistence upon guarding neutrality. When he realized that Stephenson not only would help him but also would one day give the FBI all the credit, he jumped at the chance to acquire knowledge and experience in a field new to him.

  On his other doorstep was Camp X.

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  Bletchley and Bermuda were important to BSC for detection. Camp X gave BSC its punch. These closely guarded acres of Canadian farmland were separated from the United States by a stretch of some of the blackest, coldest lake water in the world, a dramatic contrast with Bermuda, thrust far forward into a sea surrounded by war action, but lapped by warm waters.

  “Here was the coiled strength, building toward aggressive intelligence operations,” said the BSC Papers of Camp X.

  Here agents trained, guerrilla devices were tested, and Hollywood-style dummy buildings were constructed “in imitation of important Nazi hide-outs to be invaded by the parachutist collectors of Nazi vermin,” in Stephenson’s more forceful words. “If Bermuda was the outthrust defensive arm, Camp X was the clenched fist preparing for the knockout.”

  This linkage of Camp X with Bermuda was typified by the case of SS General Heydrich. It was clear by the end of 1940 that Heydrich hoped to achieve power subordinate only to Hitler. Evidence of his designs upon the United States had been retrieved by Bermuda’s trappers. His operations were analyzed by BSC in New York. Preparations for his execution were undertaken at Camp X; these involved a film producer, a set designer from Hollywood, and a French actress whose lover was a German double agent.

  Camp X was near the Toronto-Kingston highway along the north shore of Lake Ontario, about 300 miles northwest of Manhattan. It was chosen in part because it could be reached easily by FBI agents and Donovan’s men. Equipment and recruits could cross the border without attracting attention, but unauthorized visitors found it hard to reach. It was guarded on the south by forty miles of lake water and on the north by a dense, deep strip of bushland. The approaches from east and west were under constant scrutiny. The privileged few on special missions went to Roosevelt Beach, just east of Niagara Falls on the U.S. side and crossed the dark lake waters at night, glimpsing only briefly the blackened faces of British commandos in the gloom. These veterans of raids along the enemy coasts in Europe, now the protectors of Camp X, were skilled in the use of the hatpin, the thin copper wire, and other homely, silent, lethal weapons that would not needlessly alarm the local inhabitants or draw the unwelcome attentions of the local constabulary.

  “The land was purchased in small lots in the best spy-story tradition,” said Ian Fleming, who trained there. “That is, Stephenson’s money was used, and the title transferred to a Crown company later. He and Bill Donovan figured the location was ideal for their purposes. Even in those days, Big Bill reckoned he’d be sending his own trainees up there before long.”

  Like its parent in Manhattan, the base kept growing. Station M, an important component of Camp X, faked documents, passing itself off as a radio relay transmitter. The Norman Rogers Airfield, a hundred miles to the east, trained British naval pilots and therefore had an excuse for heavily guarded hangars. One-man submarines and underwater demolition devices were tested in the lake. Buried underground was Hydra, the transmitter that linked Camp X with British secret-intelligence stations around the world. Aspidistra, the biggest radio-communication unit in the world, was added in 1943. It took its name from a London music-hall song about “the biggest aspidistra in the world.” The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation told the townspeople of neighboring Oshawa that it was putting up radio aerials, this to explain some of the strange activities that began in 1940 when the general manager of CBC, Stephenson’s old friend Gladstone Murray, the former fighter pilot, became a Baker Street Irregular.

  “Despite its Boys-Own-Adventure tone, the complex had a deadly purpose,” Murray said later. “When the British withdrew from continental Europe, their regular secret service was cut off. . . . A whole new system had to be created. . . . The nerve center for this work had to be far removed from enemy eyes, yet close to the over-all operational center of BSC in New York. It had to be able to work with U.S. citizens without contravening U.S. laws, to meet a rising demand for those with firsthand knowledge of Europe. There had to be space. Large-scale terrain maps, reproductions of buildings and targets and training grounds for paratroopers demanded room for maneuver. Obviously, we were talking about somewhere in Canada.”

  Colin Gubbins, the chief Baker Street Irregular, had pointed out to Murray: “The first men into occupied countries must be parachuted ‘blind,’ and this will continue to be the most efficient method of insertion. The coasts are guarded, the waters mined, and landing agents by sea results in high losses. We prefer to drop them in. And this requires highly specialized training in the air, for both pilots and agents.”

  “Factories” grew for production of false documents, camouflaged explosives, and all the paraphernalia of the spy trade that were life-and-death equipment, not romantic toys, to these silent invaders. The “un-gentlemanly warfare boys” were conscious of the savage, terrifying aspects of their work, while convinced that it was the only way to undermine the new totalitarians. In Canada, experts could draw upon U.S. resources. These experts came from all levels of society. Some were men and women of such distinction in public life that their involvement is unmentionable to this day. Others were safe-crackers, forgers, and professional bank robbers whose expertise could not be duplicated by legitimate entrepreneurs. A compiler for a prewar directory of German companies could make swift associations between odd items of information, as if he carried a cross index in his head. A typewriter manufacturer could duplicate any patented machine in the world. A refugee from Europe haunted pawnshops for battered suitcases made and used on the Continent. A man on the FBI’s wanted list was moved into Canada and protected a few miles north of the border as he devoted his extraordinary talent to the manufacture of counterfeit European currency.

  British censorship stations provided material and information to Station M, where forged material was inserted into diplomatic bags as well as into “ordinary” parcels en route to Europe. This alone required a great many workers with the necessary skill to unseal and reseal mail without leaving a trace. “The cost of a criminal organisation devoted to similar ends, and obliged to make it all worthwhile, would be quite uneconomic,” warned Eric Maschwitz. This composer of lyrics and musical comedies wrote, in typically cautious terms, in his autobiography: “The operations with which I was concerned under a genius known as ‘Little Bill’ were many and curious. . . . I was associated with an industrial chemist and two ruffians who could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth. I controlled a chemical laboratory in one place, a photographic studio in another. My travels took me to Canada, Brazil and Bermuda.”

  The “M” in Station M was said to stand for Magic and Jasper Maskelyne, a hero to British schoolboys before the war, one of t
he great magicians of all time and a master at the art of deception. His section at Camp X was known as the “Magic Group”; it conjured up illusions and laid false trails.

  Maskelyne was a genius at make-believe. During an early visit to the camp by Hoover, the FBI director was astonished to see what appeared to be several warships on Lake Ontario. He was standing in a hut, and Maskelyne had rigged mirrors to produce a magnified effect with toy German battle cruisers.

  “He put the conjuring arts into battle,” said Murray. “The trick was to make the enemy see what he had been led to expect.” Maskelyne flew from Camp X to all corners of the world, creating nonexistent armies, dummy cannon, trick air bases, false fleets.

  The Travellers Censorship, a division of BSC, sent Toronto special items needed for agents. Somewhere near the immigration wickets of American seaports and airfields, innocent-looking girls and men watched each pilgrim. They wanted clothes bearing the telltale stitching and labels of European tailors. They sought pens and pencils made in towns now under German occupation. They needed samples of “epistolatory paraphernalia,” in the jargon of officialdom—notepaper, rubber stamps, and stationery still in use behind Hitler’s wall.

  A traveler from Europe might be invited to step aside. Trembling, if his conscience was troubled, the newcomer would go to a cubicle, where his bags and clothing underwent a thorough search. Fearing the worst, the victim would be relieved when the official passed him through—so relieved he might not notice some small personal item had been removed, or, noticing, would prefer to make no fuss. In the United States, there was co-operation from all government departments. If the traveler happened to wear clothing needed for agents, he or she might be followed. Later, the clothing would vanish from a laundry or a secondhand shop. One way or another, it was paid for. A girl arrived in New York with a wardrobe of good-quality clothes tailored in Berlin. She passed through Customs and took the train to Chicago. Along the way, her baggage was lost. She was astonished by the generous settlement made instantly and without question by the railroad. Her clothes were in Toronto a week later, and were forwarded on a Ferry Command Liberator, together with a Jewish girl who had spent the previous three months in Camp X studying the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin. This girl was dropped into France, took the train from Paris to Berlin, and was in the heart of the Third Reich, complete with “authentic” documents and clothes, within a month.