bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1999) — Spring 1999 // Printemps 1999, pp. 44–45
THE TRUE ‘INTREPID’ AND THE UNKNOWN
AGENTS by Bill Macdonald, Timberholme
Books Ltd., Surrey, B.C., 1998, 432 pp.
$34.95
Reviewed by Kurt F. Jensen
Bill Stephenson, the Canadian-born head of the British Security Coordination in the United States during World War II, was a genuine hero. He also appears to have been something of an enigma who was not always well-served by those who have written about his exploits. That he may have fully cooperated with some of these biographers merely adds to the mystery. It may be difficult to cut to the core of the Stephenson story today. Suffice it to say that myths have arisen around his very real contribution to the Allied war efforts.
Stephenson headed British intelligence efforts in the United States during the Second World War. He arrived in New York in June 1940 and was initially listed at the British Consulate as the Passport Control Officer, the traditional cover for the Secret Intelligence Service. In the years that followed, the actions of this quiet, unassuming man became the stuff of which legends are born. Regrettably, the subsequent embroidery of the facts may have done a disservice to the memory of a man who genuinely achieved great things during World War II. The author, Winnipeg journalist Bill Macdonald, has performed a remarkable job of detective work in finding the true Bill Stephenson as well as in recording the stories of some of his assistants, mostly young Canadian women, who carried out the many daily routines of intelligence work.
Bill Macdonald’s book is an excellent contribution to the literature about the “Quiet Canadian”. Chiefly, Macdonald starts the story about Stephenson exploring his origins and presents some startling revelations. Macdonald makes the case that much of what is known about Stephenson’s youth as portrayed in the earlier literature is far from correct. Stephenson was not the Scots-Canadian that earlier books portrayed. He was born William Stanger, the son of an Orkney labourer and an Icelandic woman.
When his mother was widowed, young Bill was given to her best friend for raising. This was not an unusual occurrence for impoverished folk but may have scarred young Bill who now became a Stephenson. Certainly, he did not make much of his antecedents in later years and seems to have limited his ties with both his natural and adoptive families. He allegedly attended a school in Winnipeg which was subsequently found not to exist.
The book is not without errors. Macdonald justifiably questions much of what has been written about Stephenson, although he, himself, occasionally accepts an interesting anecdote even though logic might suggest that he should do otherwise. For example, on page 38 he comes close to accepting a story first presented in William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid. The story details an alleged accidental meeting in 1916 between Stephenson and Bill Donovan, the later American head of the OSS in World War Il, and the man portrayed as the “founder” of the CIA. Macdonald accepts the meeting between Stephenson and Donovan in England during the First World War as being conceivable. The statistical odds of the two first meeting in 1916 and then becoming close collaborators a generation later, having had no contact in the interval, would have presaged a profitable future in the lottery business. Although Macdonald lists CIA employee Thomas F. Troy’s Donovan and the CIA among his sources, he seems to discount Troy’s polite but clear and credible refutation of this apocryphal story (at least in the declassified version of the Donovan biography which Troy prepared for the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence).
But Macdonald’s greatest service to the Intrepid story may be his recounting of the memories of a host of young Canadian women (and some men) who came to New York to work with Stephenson in the British Security Coordination office. Macdonald provides texture to what has too often been portrayed as the crusade of a single individual, occasionally assisted by a small number of equally enigmatic individuals such as Ian Fleming, later famous as the creator of James Bond/007, and “Cynthia” (Elizabeth Pack), an American-born British agent who used sex as a tool of espionage the way that James Bond used fast cars.
Macdonald has recorded the stories and achievements of Molly Phair, Ruth Ferguson, Marjorie Ferguson, Pat Bayly, Dolores Hogg, Charmaine Manchee, Helen Wooley, Janet FitzGerald, Gwen Rollaston, Nancy Thompson, Dorothy Evenson, Jean Peacock, Grace Garner, and others. As well he recounts the story of Marion de Chastelain who became a Canadian after the war and is the mother of John de Chastelain, one of Canada’s leading soldiers and former ambassador to Washington.
Macdonald’s The True ’Intrepid’ does a great service in recording the story of some of the many Canadians who served with the British intelligence services in the United States during the war. Little had previously been done to record their memories of, and perspectives on, what were great events. These young people had been hired rather informally, mostly because they were British subjects and lived relatively close to New York, the hub of BSC activities in North America.
Perhaps understandably, Macdonald often serves as an oral historian, simply recording the views of his subjects. Clearly missing is an evaluation and filter of what these participants are saying. This in no way suggests that they are seeking to mislead. However, recollections of events which transpired a half century earlier may be hazy and may blur what was experienced and what has been heard or read in the interval.
Take, for example, the portrait Macdonald paints of Stephenson’s involvement in the Gouzenko affair. Macdonald presents a transcription of an interview with Benjamin de Forest [Pat] Bayly, a University of Toronto professor and BSC communications wizard, covering Stephenson’s involvement in the Gouzenko defection. According to the text, Bayly presents Stephenson as driving to Ottawa in a borrowed Buick, arresting Gouzenko [a military arrest — whatever that is], and telling W.L.M. King, Canada’s Prime Minister, that Stephenson would take Gouzenko to Britain if King did not protect him. King is quoted as replying, “No, I don’t want that.” Anyone familiar with the wily ways of Canada’s wartime Prime Minister would want some corroborating evidence. And there isn’t any. Nor, indeed, would Stephenson, a sophisticated operator, ever have been likely to have approached a Canadian Prime Minister in quite such blunt language. Nor would Stephenson have been likely to have arrested Gouzenko [militarily or otherwise] since he had no legal standing to do so. Furthermore, the Prime Minister, a man who could be prickly and was bent during these years on affirming Canada’s sovereignty and international stature, would have been highly unlikely to have accepted such strident interventions from an individual who, after all, was the representative of a foreign, albeit allied, intelligence service. Stephenson would hardly have been one to threaten Canada’s Prime Minister. Dr. Bayly is certainly not intending to mislead but may be simplifying a very complex story of Stephenson’s involvement in the Gouzenko affair. Some of the events described did happen, but not quite as portrayed.
There are similar lapses elsewhere in the book. Again on the Gouzenko defection, Macdonald states (p. 112) that Stephenson “controlled the overseas distribution of Gouzenko’s revelations and the documents he took with him following his debriefing.” No, Stephenson did not control distribution of the Gouzenko story. He correctly states that the BSC communications links were used because the Department of External Affairs cypher room and the British High Commission had been compromised by possible Soviet agents. Stephenson’s staff maintained communications between Britain and Canada on the Gouzenko affair at the early critical point using the BSC link. Stephenson may have seen the communications traffic but he was not involved.
While The True ’Intrepid’ contains some flaws it remains a good book well worth reading. And Macdonald should be commended for unveiling some of the facts about Stephenson’s early life. His effort to collect and record the memories of a group of Canadians who served in British intelligence during the War is a step towards “bringing Stephenson back to Canada”. “. But, much as I enjoyed Macdonald’s book and his quaint organization of the information, I was not convinced that this is the final story of the true Intrepid.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1999) — Spring 1999 // Printemps 1999, pp. 44–45. Read the rest of this issue →
