A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The United States had been designated since 1939 “the largest potential source of agents because of the many Americans whose origins are European, who are fluent in European languages, and who will wish to fight oppression from within,” according to the BSC Papers. For two years, 1940 and 1941, the U.S. government was officially opposed to potential agents being drawn from foreign or foreign-descended minorities, and could make its policy effective through the State and Justice departments and the Immigration Service, without whose permission a recruit found it theoretically impossible to leave the country. Despite this, some of the best agents were recruited in the U.S. for Toronto. Their acquisition had to be handled delicately when the recruit came from across the border. In exceptional cases, if bureaucracy threatened to frustrate matters, President Roosevelt was asked through Donovan to intervene. A sea captain with special knowledge of enemy waters was “sprung” in this way and then “lent” to frogman saboteurs requiring his navigational advice. None of this was ever admitted; nothing concerning the real purpose was ever entered into the record.

  This meant high-level clearances. A future prime minister of Canada and secretary-general of the United Nations, Lester B. Pearson, was a humble diplomat when Stephenson asked him to become “a King’s messenger,” conveying secret documents. Orders had to be coordinated between London, BSC in New York, and Camp X. Pearson had spent the hard winter of 1940 in London. Then he was asked to carry top-secret material across the Atlantic. He later wrote in his autobiography:

  I shall always remember this journey. I was flying from the war to peaceful unharmed Canada; from battered and beleaguered London in the hour of her agony and honour to the safe faraway city on the Ottawa River. . . .

  I was asked to carry the top secret brown envelope to a certain floor of a building in New York, the headquarters of British Security Coordination. I agreed.

  I left London the day after the heaviest and most damaging air raid of the war. When I drove to the airport fires were still burning fiercely and some buildings which had been hit were only a few yards from Canada House. . . . The contrast between that last night in London and my first exposure to a city not at war was staggering. As we flew over Lisbon, there were lights, actually lights! As we landed, we saw German and Italian planes. We went through, not military, but civilian inspection. The shops, gaily decorated, displayed fruit and flowers and candies. Very strange! I had been met by a secretary of the British Embassy who warned me that my hotel was the centre of Nazi and Fascist espionage. This made me very conscious of my brown envelope. I became more anxious after an experience on entering the hotel. The first person I saw looked familiar. With a start I recognized him as a German whom I had known in Geneva during the disarmament conferences. He was a very friendly fellow. I was impulsively about to say ‘hello’ and he seemed to share the same impulse, when suddenly I realized, as he may have too, who we were and where and when.

  We turned away, and it was just as well because my British escort, who knew his way around Lisbon, pointed him out to me later as one of the principals in the German intelligence services in Spain and Portugal.

  My career as a courier was off to a shaky start, but there were no further incidents. No Mata Hari dropped her handkerchief before me in the dining-room or at the casino. Nobody tried to snatch my brown envelope from under my pillow that night. I guarded it carefully during our stops at the Azores and Bermuda. On landing in New York I took a taxi at once to my destination and rode an elevator to the appointed floor of British Security Coordination. As I got out of the elevator I expected to be stopped and asked to produce my credentials; or, if not there, certainly outside the particular room where I was to hand over my envelope. Nobody bothered me. There was indeed a New York policeman in a chair outside the door of the office I was seeking. But he was dozing and ignored my entrance over his outstretched legs. Within the office a receptionist glanced at my credentials, signed for my envelope, thanked me, and said goodbye. This all seemed very casual for a secret service, a first impression of carelessness which I later found to be deceptive.

  Such enlightenment quickly followed. Before he reached his home town of Toronto, forty miles from Camp X, he was collected by British interrogators who had a complete file on the German he had encountered in Lisbon. “They were alarmed,” he said later, “by the possibility that one name contained in my package could have been identified. I said the German intelligence chief would have to be not only telepathic but also a codebreaker and miracle-worker. One name was a cover for myself: MIKE.”

  Pearson went on to serve in Washington. His wry memoirs, Mike, reveal a good-humored tolerance of the sillier aspects of espionage. During his wartime career, however, he was as dedicated and tight-lipped as any, but what he could not know was that the name so closely guarded was that of a girl, not his own.

  He wrote: “The need was for unconventional men and women who understood that the Second World War was ideological and fought against political terrorists. The guerilla and the agent had to forego the certainty and tradition of regimental life—the external marks of respect, uniforms and unquestioning obedience.”

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided facilities and manpower without asking questions. Ernest W. Bavin, a fifth senior superintendent attached to Canadian intelligence headquarters, for instance, was swept in mid-career into adventures unforeseen even by a Mountie. He said later: “Recruits might be picked out by talent spotters as they passed through Bermuda en route from Europe to the United States, or identified in American trade unions as activists. A batch of Peruvian airmen in New York, on their way home from Italian flying schools, provided one recruit. Another was a Yugoslav-born American official of the United Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union. What seemed like faults to rigid disciplinarians of the regular services often appealed to Stephenson as evidence of strong will power and an independent cast of mind.”

  The chances of fulfilling a mission had been worked out statistically and were known to many recruits: three chances in a hundred that the recruit would be incapacitated before going into action; three chances in a hundred of capture; one chance in three that if captured, he or she would be interrogated by the Gestapo. The situation was far worse in reality. Of 250 agents who left for the relatively quiet region of Belgium, 105 were arrested, of whom only forty survived. The life expectancy of the “pianists,” or radio operators, they were warned, was six months in most areas. The casualties in training, of course, thinned out the ranks. The character and intelligence of the would-be agent were tested day and night. Ian Fleming took one course. “Ian was exceptionally good at underwater demolition, which we carried out in Lake Ontario,” said Stephenson. “The water there is ice cold even in summer. Ian had a flair for the work. He had to deal with his own vivid imagination though.

  “He went through an exercise called ‘disposal of the tail,’ the enemy agent on the trail of our man. He was told that the supposed agent had returned to a room in a hotel. This was a mock-up hotel near Toronto used for these exercises. Ian was to push open the door fast and shoot the alleged agent, actually a former Shanghai policeman, name of Fairbairn, one of our instructors. Ian walked along the corridor, and I loaded a Smith and Wesson 45 and handed it over. I said: ‘It’s all checked out. I tested it on the range yesterday. Now, you’ve got to take this seriously. Kick open that door and shoot the guy before he can possibly draw. Otherwise you’re going to be a dead Ian.’ He went up to the door, put his hand on the knob, and stopped dead. I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said: ‘Bill, you know I can’t shoot a man in cold blood.’ He had too much imagination. A good imagination. He thought of the other fella lying in a pool of blood while he was alive and well, even though he knew it was all a game. . . .”

  Churchill’s term for the specialists in unarmed combat was “leopards,” the word he had first used to describe Canadians evolving commando-type operations in World War I when he first met Stephenson. The leopards taught silent methods of k
illing, from the karate chop to slipping an ordinary needle into a part of the neck where it produced instant death. They put recruits through commando training: parachuting, handling of weapons and explosives, mountain climbing. The training was directed by Colonel John Skinner Wilson, transferred from Military Intelligence. His staff included “Mad Mike” Calvert, who later fought in the jungle with Orde Wingate, having spent his life between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five virtually learning, teaching, or practicing these deadly skills.

  The girls were taken into FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which gave them an innocent look. They seemed cheerful and harmless, putting up with the charge of being “a posh but idle corps.” Their specialty was radio work. They were later attached to the secret armies. The “executions” of top Nazis were carried out, for example, because these girls provided close and continuous communication between clandestine transmitters and London.

  Every agent received training in Morse code. “I dreamed in Morse,” said one girl destined for France. “I even knitted in Morse.”

  Some agents with special knowledge were needed by SIS for intelligence-gathering missions. This did not always mean stealing enemy secrets. William Deakin was a professor who quit BSC in New York to command a partisan mission. Deakin had been literary assistant to Churchill, and an Oxford tutor in modern history. Why was an obviously valuable man like this dropped into an almost suicidal mission? The reason was that British scholars were needed in the field for tasks requiring particular qualities of intellect, filling gaps in the knowledge of the secret armies. “Many of the scholars who fled from Europe were not capable of decisive action despite their vehement declarations of hostility to Hitler,” said an official account of recruitment problems. “Anti-Fascist intellectuals from Europe who sought sanctuary in the Western Hemisphere were in general not of tough enough fibre.” Some European academics thought the work distasteful and displayed a misunderstanding of its purpose. The pseudo-scientific definition of “the ideal agent,” given later by an American psychiatrist, conveys some of the misconceptions regarding agents. They were “men who plunge headlong into an undertaking of fast change and danger because they are discontented,” he wrote. “They want to give worth and meaning to their otherwise futile lives.”

  The British approach was fundamentally different. Harold Macmillan, the publisher who became a prime minister, summed it up when describing a comrade’s ordeal under German fire. “If he had fallen, later, into a psychiatrist’s hands, he would have been sent to a mental home as insane. Instead, he was back in action next day.” Many of Macmillan’s literary colleagues worked in intelligence and took the same view: it was work where common sense counted more than pseudo-scientific claptrap. Stephenson looked for agents who believed in human decency and then found the job to fit their talent. He saw nothing wrong with “a love of productive peril” or a certain flamboyance if there was a moral force behind it. Years later, he gave this formula: “Some of the best agents are those who in peacetime make good bankers, physicians, or creative artists. Their response to danger is positive. In modern terms, they belong to the Type-A personality who has full control of himself although driven by great energy. The good agent starts out as a man who chose action over inaction but who learns to control his impulses and detach himself from a temporary reality in order to resume abstract thought.”

  A Personality Structure of the Ideal Agent was later drafted by American intelligence specialists in an attempt to systematize what had been informal and imprecise. American mass-production methods seemed to require a more definitive approach, with everything spelled out. They pinpointed, unconsciously, subtle differences between Americans and British that served as mild irritants. Some British concealed character under a veneer of dandyism. Their high-pitched nasal mumblings, passing for conversation, were useful for evading precise conversation on delicate issues. Young veterans from Britain had to be warned that outspoken FBI and U.S. intelligence officers who trained at Camp X were underestimated if their cousins thought all Americans were loudmouthed and shallow.

  Even at the top, differences in national character caused tension. It was one reason Canada and Canadians provided such a singular service, being part of both worlds. Even senior officers at Anglo-American staff talks were not above fisticuffs. The Anglo-American Chiefs of Staff still irritated each other. “Brooke got nasty and King got good and sore. King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God, he was mad! I wish he had socked him,” commented General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. He was describing, not two groups of schoolboys challenging one another, but a British general and an American admiral whose tempers were worn thin by personal idiosyncrasies that grew out of totally different backgrounds.

  At Camp X, the only enemy was in Europe, and the trainees were taught that if a fight was inevitable, it was often better to “put a German in hospital. That ties up other Germans. A dead one is buried and out of the way.” Students were taught leverage in attacking a man hand to hand; and they were taught the vulnerable parts of the body, rather more than most would suppose. “You’ve always got a weapon in your pockets: a nail file, a pin, a fountain pen.” A box of matches could be thrown blazing into the face of a sudden attacker, blinding him; but there was a right and a wrong way of exploding the matches.

  Scotland Yard detectives found themselves apprehensively teaching the gentle art of smuggling. A girl learned she had more places of concealment in her body than a man. She should take advantage of the reluctance of police to search the more intimate parts. With practice and regular exercise of the vaginal muscles, a woman could carry objects of considerable size.

  The L pill could be carried in the mouth. The capsule’s skin was insoluble. If the pill was swallowed by accident, it passed through the body without causing harm. If crushed between the teeth, the contents of potassium cyanide brought quick death.

  The first agents into Europe found their forged papers outdated or badly faked. A routine inspection quickly betrayed them. Part of these troubles stemmed from wartime Britain’s lack of materials. The documentation centers in Canada could draw on limitless reserves in the Western Hemisphere. Samples of German-occupation forms, rubber stamps, and inks were obtained through the BSC network, along with domestic articles that civilians were using under Nazi occupation: battered suitcases, ersatz toothpaste, cheap caps—and all providing possible places of concealment. A bewildered arrival from Genoa would wonder why his spectacles were borrowed by immigration authorities in New York. They were copied and sent up to Toronto for mass production, so that at some time in the future a bespectacled agent could carry a microdot in the form of a speck of dust on a lens.

  The traffic in eccentric bits of equipment across the U.S.–Canada border was continuous. Some had to be smuggled. This gave trainees a mild taste of reality. When BSC was preparing agents in New York for an assignment, they might suddenly be required to smuggle medical drugs across the border because of a provision in regulations; the smuggling was safer than confiding to Customs men the reason for the drugs.

  The time approached when Americans would call on stations like Camp X for instructors, equipment, and handbooks. An American officer inspecting sabotage devices, developed by the BSC Scientific Research Section, said, “I don’t see any article of everyday use that’s safe to touch,” looking at explosive loaves of bread, fountain pens that squirted cyanide, artificial logs that would blow up when tossed on a fire, and booby traps that ranged from incendiary cigarettes to animal droppings. The manure heaps were made of explosive plastic and painted to resemble the excrement found in different parts of the world, after consultation with Professor Julian Huxley, who ran the London Zoo. There was a particular demand for elephant droppings for use in Asia, where the plastic dung could be placed alongside the real faeces on trails used by the enemy. “It was one time,” said Elder Wills, “when bullshit really did more than baffle brains. It blew ’em up.” He was improvising on the unofficial Camp X slogan, camou
flaged in the acronym BBB: Bullshit Baffles Brains.

  Elder Wills was a former scenic artist from London’s Drury Lane who became a camouflage expert. He was the friendly rival of Alexander Korda, who, with his brother, Zoltan, reproduced locales in Nazi territories so that missions could be rehearsed as if enacting the scenarios for movies. Wills had escaped from Dunkirk and spent the following weeks frantically building cardboard tanks and wooden aircraft to distort enemy reconnaissance reports and discourage those contemplating invasion. He was a master of disguise and make-believe. Some of his prewar film sets were made for Stephenson in the Shepperton studios. He had no difficulty creating bogus airfields and camouflaging the real ones. Then he was plunged into the more complex BSC world of deception, where he was horrified to learn that agents were equipped in the beginning with radio transmitters straight from Army stores. He launched the search for European refugee suitcases in which miniaturized sets could be squeezed and camouflaged. He produced a secret ink that showed only under infrared light, and then designed pocket flashlights with infrared discs by which to read the secret ink. His first workshop was in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.