But attacks like that of Crossman gained ground in the years ahead. And Soviet Russia’s own “disinformation bureau” began the task of discrediting Western intelligence agencies, recognizing in them powerful defenses in the new era of surprise warfare.
By 1947, INTREPID’S secret war was buried under conventional accounts of military campaigns. The British contribution to the new weapons, both nuclear and guerrilla, was virtually forgotten. Congress, reacting to the rising hostility of the Soviet Union and the condition called the “Cold War,” passed a hotly debated National Security Act that set up an information-gathering agency. On September 18, 1947, two years after the OSS was dissolved, the Central Intelligence Agency came into being. And so the peacetime alliance, so earnestly advocated by Stephenson and Donovan, slipped into oblivion.
Churchill let cities be mauled rather than expose those secrets on which the survival of democratic civilization might depend. There were no bloodless alternatives unless leaders were to retreat into self-righteous horror and refuse to make decisions at all.
“A similar situation exists today,” said Stephenson. “The easy way out is to pretend there are no crises. That’s the way to win elections. That’s the way we stumbled into war in the first place—there were too many men in power who preferred to see no threat to freedom because to admit to such a threat implies a willingness to accept sacrifice to combat it. There’s a considerable difference between being high-minded and soft-headed.”
There was a long silence. Outside the study, the yellow-breasted kiskadees of Bermuda crowded the bird tables in the garden, their cries drifting through the window.
I broke the silence: “For the first time in history, we see everywhere the means of conveying information—and everywhere we seem in greater darkness than before. Secrecy seems like a disease—”
“That might destroy us?”
“It seems a clear threat to the freedom we have.”
“More than half the world is under dictatorship,” said Stephenson. “Those people do not know what we call ‘freedom.’ Only sixty generations stretch back from you and me, here, to the dawn of Western history. Two world wars in this century remind us that ‘civilized’ Europe is the bat of an eye from the Dark Ages. We’ve sailed a long, stormy course to this small island of freedom. We had to endure the sacrifices of war, risk our lives daily, carry on despite the loss of those we love, and overcome statistically insuperable odds to preserve what we have. Are we now to admit that we can no longer find the means to control the weapons we create to defend ourselves? Or are we saying we can’t control ourselves? For free people, the future is filled with hazard and challenge. When was that not so?”
Such a very small island, I thought, when measured against recorded history. Did living in Bermuda suggest the analogy to Stephenson? He had retired here for practical reasons to do with his own need for anonymity. And he had withdrawn here to reflect. His life had come briefly out of obscurity in 1962 when British author H. Montgomery Hyde published a revealing account of “The Quiet Canadian” in Room 3603. Ian Fleming wrote of it: “Bill Stephenson worked himself almost to death carrying out undercover operations and often dangerous assignments that can only be hinted at. . . .”
Stephenson was then living in an apartment overlooking the East River in New York. He withdrew when the last BSC papers were disposed of, making no comment about the brief biographical exposure. In Bermuda, he was left undisturbed to fight against severe physical handicaps caused by two wars. There are a few clues to Stephenson’s character in his modest home there. The evidence would suggest a retired professor with an interest in wildlife. But one would search in vain for diaries, photographs, or souvenirs that reassure those who have retired. Stephenson discarded purely personal papers and memorabilia with the same ruthlessness that he destroyed his past in the mid-1930’s. He had his phenomenal memory. And he had Mary, his wife, with her own amazing capacity for recall.
While writing this book, I regularly visited the Stephensons to check details. Mary would greet me and then “disappear into the woodwork,” a trick she knew to perfection. Bill, dressed in casual slacks and a plaid shirt, would stand in his corner of that austere study and grasp my hand with a grip of iron.
“This is your book,” he declared. “Write it the way you see it.” But he struggled against this becoming his biography. He wanted it to give a fundamental understanding of the secret war. The time had come for the telling, and he was the custodian of the facts. He took quiet pride in his knighthood because it was recognition of public service. Otherwise, as I had learned from the wartime Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, he drew no salary throughout the war, and gave away much of his own resources to win it.
Mary and Bill whittled their lives down to a level of unostentatious comfort such as they had known in childhood. What retained importance in the study was the Morse key, worn and polished by his hand in periodic practice since he rigged it as a schoolboy.
“The totalitarian powers don’t have to answer to their own people for the actions of their secret agencies,” Stephenson said to me one day. “They don’t have newspapers and television probing and watching constantly. Yet they have complete freedom to conduct campaigns in our own world. They have great advantages.
“Our primary defense is more than ever information. And it’s in our interests to see that a potential aggressor is aware of our strength and resolve.
“We’re still evolving democratic societies. If we want to continue this natural growth, we can’t ignore ideological enemies who want to stunt it—or destroy it. By working through our own democratic institutions, they can disarm us. The campaigns against Western intelligence agencies are fought often with unwitting help from our own citizens, honestly outraged by the excesses of huge sealed organizations with unaccountable budgets. The disclosed failures of these agencies are widely publicized. Their achievements have to be kept secret—or they cease to be effective. The same old rule applies as it did with ULTRA—better lose a battle than lose a secret that might win a war.
“How can the citizens of a free society exercise proper control without losing these defenses? Those responsible for intelligence feel that any public scrutiny is a danger to security. The citizen feels that secret power corrupts.
“Somewhere along the line, there has to be trust. The Second World War involved thousands of individuals who had to be trusted to carry out their missions in solitude, without acclaim, making decisions that could affect whole communities. These men and women, courageous, informed, but essentially ordinary people, not professional agents or intelligence careerists, proved they could be trusted. Perhaps we had better look for them and to them in these most sensitive and critical undertakings.”
Stephenson felt that we had to get the priorities right. The greater danger to individual freedom comes from totalitarian regimes that regard any dissenting view as a threat to be destroyed—no matter if the threat comes from a lonely writer protesting against injustice or from another nation. One nation has the power to stop this obliteration of dissenting views—the United States.
“At the worst moment in Britain’s resistance in 1940,” he recalled, “John Buchan wrote: ‘The United States is actually and potentially the most powerful State on the globe. She has much, I believe, to give the world; indeed, to her hands is chiefly entrusted the shaping of the future. If democracy in the broadest and truest sense is to survive, it will be mainly because of her guardianship. For, with all her imperfections, she has a clearer view than any other people of the democratic fundamentals.’
“Every word,” said Stephenson, “is true today. Which is why our enemies would like to isolate the United States and see her retreat from the confusion and the chaos as she did during the rise of the Third Reich.
“I believe Americans will resist the pressures and the propaganda to discard primary defenses. They’ll find responsible ways to control the weapons of secrecy. I don’t agree with that metaphor of Walt
er Lippmann that the peoples of the West, to stop their hands shaking, prepare to welcome manacles.
“It would be a great irony if, having proved to the would-be conquerors of the world that freedom will prevail, we cannot prove it to ourselves.”
The most compelling reason for Stephenson’s willingness to reopen a chapter of his life that he had hoped was closed forever is that BSC affords a glimpse of what can be done by the citizens of many nations when their freedoms have been savagely threatened or destroyed. Churchill, on being made an honorary citizen of the United States, drafted a letter to President John F. Kennedy. He broke the key sentences into blank verse, as was his habit, and caught the essence of Stephenson’s own feelings:
Our comradeship
and our brotherhood in war
were unexampled.
We stood together
and because of that
the free world now stands.
Stephenson later wrote: “We learn from experience. The comradeship reveals itself whenever these dark forces try to reassert themselves. This brotherhood is a human response that grows within us. It cannot be legislated any more than can a mother’s response to danger. It becomes a matter of courteous and concerned habit within our evolving civilization.
“What is often forgotten is that the worst abuses of power within our democratic societies are exposed by our own people. The spirit of resistance is opposed to all forms of tyranny. We purge ourselves while we resist our enemies. This is the response of a concerned citizenry, knowing freedom is in danger, putting the responsibility for defending it squarely on individuals of honor and good intent. This is a sense of brotherhood that won’t fit into rules and regulations. And so long as this holds true, there will always be struggle, but there will be no final defeat.”
Once a year, those who worked with BSC or OSS exchange greetings on a card with the silhouette of a parachutist dropping into the arsenals of Hell. Printed on the bottom are the words Spirit of Resistance. The cards fly across national frontiers and political boundaries. A frequent inscription is taken from a French Resistance song:
When you fall, my friend,
Another friend will emerge
From the shadows
To take your place.
“That may seem a flimsy kind of mysticism to pin your faith on,” said the man called INTREPID. “But it’s all we’ve ever had in bad times.
“Abraham Lincoln captured its essence more than a century ago when he wrote: ‘What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, or bristling seacoasts, our army and navy. . . . Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere.’
“Roosevelt understood that spirit, replaced the friends who fell, and gave us the means to salvage liberty again. Strong armies would have been useless without that deeper commitment to principles. The human race came very close to falling into a Dark Age.
“The same spirit still lives. Perhaps it only survives through struggle. It’s needed now to re-create an alliance in defense of the main priorities of Western civilization. This is what we did then. This is what we can do now.”
I listened to this valiant man and thought once again how superbly apt Winston Churchill had been in selecting his code name: INTREPID.
VALEDICTION
Before taking leave of this book, which has occupied most of my working time for almost three years, I want to acknowledge those who have most particularly contributed to my efforts. INTREPID, as the reader will know, made many things possible and, because of them, this book as well. For that, and more, I tender him my boundless gratitude.
It must be evident that I owe a large debt to those who, through direct interviews with me or INTREPID, generously provided significant detail to certain events I selected to illustrate the vast scope of secret warfare. Many others entrusted to me personal and confidential documents. When possible, and only with their consent, I have identified such contributors in the appropriate place in the text. At times, however, the nature of the material or the structure of the narrative did not permit attribution. And in some instances, for compelling reasons, many confidants could not be openly identified. Rather than single out some and not others, I have refrained from appending here what would prove to be an imposing list in length as well as in content. I have privately expressed myself to these unnamed individuals and here remind each of my appreciation.
No one who served in the secret armies would begrudge special mention of that extraordinary and self-effacing man General Sir Colin Gubbins, who remained characteristically gentle but unswervingly resolute through the bitter years of suffering, and of his Norwegian wife, Tulla, who bore her share of hardship and loss with fortitude. They typify the irregulars—French, British, American, Dutch, Canadian, Belgian, whatever their nationality—those who fought as individuals against the mechanized juggernaut, who accepted anonymity in adversity, and thus did not receive the prayerful thanks they so richly deserved. I am particularly grateful to them.
Institutional sources I have acknowledged in the text. I hold a special obligation to the crown corporation that gave cover for such BSC operations as Camp X, Station M, and Hydra—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which aided me by many indispensable services, including archival material and illustrations.
Herbert Rowland’s integrity and loyalty during thirty-five years of devotion to INTREPID insured absolute discretion in the safekeeping and security of the BSC Papers and other records from which I drew so much material.
To save me from drowning in vast oceans of detail, Julian Muller, friend and editor, formerly of U.S. Naval Intelligence and with four years of wartime service at sea, helped launch this book and then navigate its course with what INTREPID himself described as “authoritative sorcery.”
William Stevenson
Toronto, Canada
A Man Called Intrepid Page 56